Nano tubes is a possible future for continued shrinking of our present circuits and manufacturing processes. Intel has earlier carried out successful tests and are investigating the possibilities for nano tubes. Nantero is a german-based company, solely concentrating on this, and they’ve came pretty far with the development. So far, they’ve developed conductors small as 22nm. Nantero focusses on developing memory modules that are supposed to combine the upsides with both SRAM and DRAM at the time, but in the future we just might see more of the nano tubes in other places as well, if everything goes well.
“There are several major obstacles which have prevented carbon nanotubes from being used in silicon CMOS fabs. One is that carbon nanotubes come mixed with substantial metallic contamination, such as iron. This makes it incompatible with a CMOS fab right from the start. A second is that no one had ever developed a method for reliably positioning carbon nanotubes on a silicon wafer in a mass production process. We have overcome both of these problems, and many other problems, and are using carbon nanotubes in production CMOS fabs today.”
