Researchers at IBM have made the first experimental nanotube transistor that is smaller than 10 nanometers. It is the smallest carbon nanotube transistor ever made at 9nm and according to researchers it performs better than any other transistor has at this size. Silicon is currently used for making transistor used in microchips. As we go down in processor size silicon is reaching its physical limits and many scientists believe that using silicon for transistor below 10nm will cause lot of problems.

To solve this problem researchers are looking at carbon nanotube, as it offers superior electrical properties and would make for better transistors at ever-tinier sizes than 10nm. The IBM group demonstrated that its nine-nanometer nanotube transistor had much lower power consumption than other transistors the same size. And it can carry more current than comparable silicon devices, which means a better signal.

"If nanotubes can't go much further than silicon, then working on them is a waste of time," says IBM researcher Aaron Franklin. "We've made nanotube transistors at aggressively scaled dimensions, and shown they are tremendously better than the best silicon devices."

"The results really highlight the value of nanotubes in the most sophisticated type of transistors," says John Rogers, professor of materials science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "They suggest, very clearly, that nanotubes have the potential for doing something truly competitive with, or complementary to, silicon."

According to researchers, the nanotube transistor outperform the best competing silicon devices with more than four times the diameter-normalized current density (2.41 mA/μm) at a low operating voltage of 0.5 V. The nanotube transistor exhibits an impressively small inverse subthreshold slope of 94 mV/decade—nearly half of the value expected from a previous theoretical study.

Even though IBM was able to develop and demonstrate 9nm nanotube transistor, the technology is far from ready for manufacturing. And it might take several years before we actually see a processor based in transistors made with carbon nanotubes. [Via Technology Review]