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Nanotech's promises and perils

Tags:
Nantero,
Carbon Nanotubes,
Nanotechnology,
Silicon

Michael Kanellos, CNET News.com CNET News

Published: 11 Jul 2003 09:53 BST

They also bend, a property crucial to Nantero's approach. In the company's chips, parallel rows of carbon nanotubes are embedded in silicon. Suspended above them are perpendicular rows of nanotubes. When the upper and lower tubes aren't touching, electrical resistance in the upper tube is fairly high. (The tubes are all ultimately plugged into wires.) The computer reads the relatively high electrical resistance of the nanotube and interprets this as a 0.

Applying a small electrical charge, however, causes the top carbon nanotube to bow -- like a guitar string on a fret -- and, through van der Waals forces, bond with the lower tube. The bonding lowers the electrical resistance, which is interpreted as a 1. Millions of microscopic junctures -- the meeting points between the carbon tubes -- serving up 1s or 0s then lead to a digital photograph, or to any other complex data file.

In its experimental wafer, 98 percent of the junctures worked, Schmergel said. The wafer was heated to 200 degrees Celsius, and it still worked, he added.

While a lot more work needs to be done, the results are promising, he said. By late 2004 or early 2005, the company hopes to have 64-kilobit prototype memory chips out to potential licensees. (Like many semiconductor start-ups, Nantero is likely license its technology, rather than make chips itself.)

Now, the bad,BR>However, major pitfalls also exist. For starters, Nantero is promoting carbon nanotubes. To semiconductor companies, new and revolutionary technologies often represent new and revolutionary methods for losing billions of dollars. In 2002, Advanced Micro Devices attempted to include "silicon on insulator," a design technique for reducing power consumption, in its chips. The result? One product was redesigned, and others were delayed.

Of all the technological changes you could foist on a semiconductor maker, a new material such as carbon is the scariest, according to various researchers. There are just too many unknowns and variables, which is why many of the established companies say that they won't be looking at replacing traditional silicon technology for a decade or so. And this makes establishing a quick revenue pipeline difficult for a company like Nantero.

Going from the lab to the plant won't be easy, either. How do you plant billions of tubes on a 12-inch wafer in a mass-manufacturing environment? Where are we going to buy nanotubes? Right now, one of the main suppliers is Carbon Nanotechnologies, which charges $500 a gram on its e-commerce site. And what do we do with all the people trained in silicon development and manufacturing? These are just some of the questions chipmakers are going to ask.

There is yet another potential problem. Schmergel and two chemistry PhDs from Harvard -- Thomas Rueckes and Brent Segal -- founded the company. Right now, nanotechnology experts -- especially those at larger companies -- tend to complain about the same thing: too many academics are trying to commercialise their lab results too early. Although Rueckes and Segal are undoubtedly brilliant, they will face mounting scepticism.

Schmergel is also new to chipmaking. Before Nantero, he founded some Internet companies and spent time at consulting firms. This is the sort of resume that makes chip people cringe. Semiconductor execs generally hail from three foreign countries: China, Japan and Pennsylvania. They are usually engineers by training and had to claw their way up through the ranks of plant management, sales or chip design.

In other words, it's a slightly insular society. Regardless, Nantero could still succeed in the end.

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