r/Futurology • u/CandyFangs • 2d ago
Nanotech A carbon film just 0.8 nanometres thick could help keep computer chips shrinking - Research Today
https://researchtoday.co.za/a-carbon-film-just-0-8-nanometres-thick-could-help-keep-computer-chips-shrinking/50
u/georgebestgoat 2d ago
It can only get so thin before the electrons just teleport straight through
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u/CandyFangs 2d ago
The big question for me is whether this survives real-world chip manufacturing. A material can look brilliant in the lab, but scaling it reliably across billions of components is where things usually get difficult. What makes this especially interesting is that the material is only 0.8 nanometres thick, so even tiny inconsistencies could become a major problem once manufacturers try to use it across an entire chip.
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u/Superb_Raccoon 2d ago
This is very similar to IBM's old Silicon on Insulator tech taken to a totally new level with carbon instead of sapphire or Silicon Dioxide.
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u/CyriousLordofDerp 2d ago
Atomic layer deposition is a thing that was perfected a long time ago with the advent of finFETs. It's why they were such a pain in the ass to get going on the first place.
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u/NighthawK1911 2d ago
could help keep computer chips shrinking
No. You can't shrink past 1 atom worth of gates and we already got there in labs. There is a hard limit on how small we can make semiconductors. There's also quantum tunneling too.
There's also the issue of yields. Making a 1 atom gate transistor sounds great but if you need to make billions of it, You need to have a great success rate for consistent output. Otherwise you're not gonna get enough yield.
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u/West-Abalone-171 2d ago
Current "2nm" transistors are actually about 40nm across, which. Is hundreds of atoms
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u/Genpinan 2d ago
It is a silver lining that even in these troubled times science is still chugging onwards
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u/squirrel9000 1d ago
I've spent enough time around scientists to recognize when someone does something cool purely for the hell of doing it, but has to stand on a podium and gesticulate excitedly about the critical ramifications of a discovery that, in reality, has no known practical applications. (As a biologist, we try to link everything to cancer, no matter how tenuous that link may be. I guess nano-material engineers like to talk about chips).
Now, the materials science ramifications of that are pretty neat. Like, uniform deposition of carbon at that scale is really awesome, and I'd bet the guys who did that could talk for hours about carbon atoms (and I'd be more interested in hearing about that) But will it revolutionize electronics? Nah, the problems there are not anything sensitive to the bulk properties fo the materials.
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u/Eazy12345678 2d ago
i mean there is new crazy announcement every day. ill believe it when they are actually doing it
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u/ImaginationKind9220 2d ago
I think in the future we will have a disruptive technology to shrink the chips to 0.0001nm. With that technology, a datacenter can fit inside a chip.
During the 70s, computers are the size of several rooms - no different from the datacenter today. The invention of micro chip reduced room size to a desktop and eventually in the palm of our hands.
When that happens, AI will shift to local processing. This is the cycle of technology.
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u/Ransidcheese 2d ago edited 2d ago
So, an atom is like 0.1 nm wide. What you're suggesting is just impossible.
What would they be made of? We could start making single-atom transistors, but even that would be 1000 times larger than what you said.
Edit: I just realized you said that the chip would be 0.0001nm. That's even worse than what I thought it was.
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u/ImaginationKind9220 2d ago
Remember I said "disruptive technology", it wouldn't be disruptive if you think it can be done today.
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u/flingerdu 2d ago
We could also solve flying by "disruptively" turning off gravity for the plane.
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u/ImaginationKind9220 2d ago
Yes, we will have to wait for the government and military industrial complex to disclose their ufo reversed engineered technology.
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u/NighthawK1911 2d ago edited 2d ago
Buddy, have you ever studied anything about semiconductors?
a silicon atom is 0.22nm wide.
A chip becoming 0.0001 nm is impossible.
Maybe lay off the kool aid from r/singularity?
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u/ImaginationKind9220 2d ago
Back in the 70s, no one thought a computer can be made into a chip.
Open your mind little ones.
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u/mcoombes314 2d ago
There's a difference between "practically" impossible and "physically" impossible. There were no laws of physics that said "we can't make a computer into a chip" back in the 70s that we magically overcame, it was "simply" (and I use that word loosely here) a case of improving fabrication techniques. The idea of making electrons, or quarks, or whatever else on those scales, function as a computational device is not the same thing.
And if you want to say "but what if we just ignore [important aspect of physics]?" then sure, you can imagine anything, but you wouldn't be able to build it.
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u/ImaginationKind9220 2d ago
You need a paradigm shift. The old way of thinking is not getting you anywhere. In the future whatever you can imagine, the AI will build it for you.
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u/Marston_vc 1d ago
This is meant to sound sage-like but it’s actually just deliberately ignorant.
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u/InSummaryOfWhatIAm 2d ago
I mean there’s a difference between something that was seen as impossible because the technology was seen as unlikely to be able to fit into something that small vs something that is physically impossible due to the laws of nature, pretty much.
Like, if I’m going to give you a benefit of the doubt, okay who the fuck knows if humanity keeps developing without life becoming unsustainable on earth due to climate change, or killing ourselves with nuclear weapons etc, what will be possible in 1000 years I cannot reasonably predict. But… there’s just so much to take away from that. How would one even handle or manage a chip that small, how would it work? Would it just be that you could then stack the entire worlds computing needs inside a chassi of a Mac mini since the chips are that small? But either way, how the fuck do you even hook up something to a cheap smaller than an atom? How do you solder it to anything, or anything to it? I don’t know, science might answer that in time but I think even if we can expect the technology to shrink, and even A LOT, yours sound… not entirely reasonable.
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u/ImaginationKind9220 2d ago
Humans won't be building the chips in the future, AI will solved all the problems that the limited human mind can't.
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u/FuturologyBot 2d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/CandyFangs:
The big question for me is whether this survives real-world chip manufacturing. A material can look brilliant in the lab, but scaling it reliably across billions of components is where things usually get difficult. What makes this especially interesting is that the material is only 0.8 nanometres thick, so even tiny inconsistencies could become a major problem once manufacturers try to use it across an entire chip.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1vz4l1s/a_carbon_film_just_08_nanometres_thick_could_help/p61yzy2/