Think Small: IBM Researchers Demonstrate Carbon Nanotubes, Potential Silicon Successors

Since I posted about Hurricane Sandy earlier in the day, I’ve seen some pretty stunning pictures and video coming in, and heard more reports from friends in and around the New York City area.

The story of the crane toppling over on a very tall building being built on West 57th Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues (my old IBM office is at Madison and 57th, further east) was most stunning. You can find some of the pics or video on CNN.

While we wait to discover how big a problem Sandy presents to the northeast Atlantic coast, I’ll share with you a diversion focusing on a much smaller topic — but one with potentially huge implications.

IBM scientists recently demonstrated a new approach to carbon technology that opens up the path for commercial fabrication of dramatically smaller, faster and more powerful computer chips.

For the first time, more than ten thousand working transistors made of nano-sized tubes of carbon have been precisely placed and tested in a single chip using standard semiconductor processes.

These carbon devices are poised to replace and outperform silicon technology allowing further miniaturization of computing components and leading the way for future microelectronics.

Four Decades Of Innovation

Aided by rapid innovation over four decades, silicon microprocessor technology has continually shrunk in size and improved in performance, thereby driving the information technology revolution.

Silicon transistors, tiny switches that carry information on a chip, have been made smaller year after year, but they are approaching a point of physical limitation.

Their increasingly small dimensions, now reaching the nanoscale, will prohibit any gains in performance due to the nature of silicon and the laws of physics. Within a few more generations, classical scaling and shrinkage will no longer yield the sizable benefits of lower power, lower cost and higher speed processors that the industry has become accustomed to.

Carbon nanotubes represent a new class of semiconductor materials whose electrical properties are more attractive than silicon, particularly for building nanoscale transistor devices that are a few tens of atoms across.

Electrons in carbon transistors can move easier than in silicon-based devices allowing for quicker transport of data. The nanotubes are also ideally shaped for transistors at the atomic scale, an advantage over silicon.

These qualities are among the reasons to replace the traditional silicon transistor with carbon — and coupled with new chip design architectures — will allow computing innovation on a miniature scale for the future.

The approach developed at IBM labs paves the way for circuit fabrication with large numbers of carbon nanotube transistors at predetermined substrate positions. The ability to isolate semiconducting nanotubes and place a high density of carbon devices on a wafer is crucial to assess their suitability for a technology — eventually more than one billion transistors will be needed for future integration into commercial chips.

Hardly A Carbon Copy

Until now, scientists have been able to place at most a few hundred carbon nanotube devices at a time, not nearly enough to address key issues for commercial applications.

Originally studied for the physics that arises from their atomic dimensions and shapes, carbon nanotubes are being explored by scientists worldwide in applications that span integrated circuits, energy storage and conversion, biomedical sensing and DNA sequencing.

This achievement was published today in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Carbon, a readily available basic element from which crystals as hard as diamonds and as soft as the “lead” in a pencil are made, has wide-ranging IT applications.

Carbon nanotubes are single atomic sheets of carbon rolled up into a tube. The carbon nanotube forms the core of a transistor device that will work in a fashion similar to the current silicon transistor, but will be better performing. They could be used to replace the transistors in chips that power our data-crunching servers, high performing computers and ultra fast smart phones.

Earlier this year, IBM researchers demonstrated  carbon nanotube transistors can operate as excellent switches at molecular dimensions of less than ten nanometers – the equivalent to 10,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair and less than half the size of the leading silicon technology. Comprehensive modeling of the electronic circuits suggests that about a five to ten times improvement in performance compared to silicon circuits is possible.

There are practical challenges for carbon nanotubes to become a commercial technology notably, as mentioned earlier, due to the purity and placement of the devices. Carbon nanotubes naturally come as a mix of metallic and semiconducting species and need to be placed perfectly on the wafer surface to make electronic circuits. For device operation, only the semiconducting kind of tubes is useful which requires essentially complete removal of the metallic ones to prevent errors in circuits.

Also, for large scale integration to happen, it is critical to be able to control the alignment and the location of carbon nanotube devices on a substrate.

To overcome these barriers, IBM researchers developed a novel method based on ion-exchange chemistry that allows precise and controlled placement of aligned carbon nanotubes on a substrate at a high density — two orders of magnitude greater than previous experiments, enabling the controlled placement of individual nanotubes with a density of about a billion per square centimeter.

The process starts with carbon nanotubes mixed with a surfactant, a kind of soap that makes them soluble in water. A substrate is comprised of two oxides with trenches made of chemically-modified hafnium oxide (HfO2) and the rest of silicon oxide (SiO2). The substrate gets immersed in the carbon nanotube solution and the nanotubes attach via a chemical bond to the HfO2 regions while the rest of the surface remains clean.

By combining chemistry, processing and engineering expertise, IBM researchers are able to fabricate more than ten thousand transistors on a single chip.

Furthermore, rapid testing of thousands of devices is possible using high volume characterization tools due to compatibility to standard commercial processes.

As this new placement technique can be readily implemented, involving common chemicals and existing semiconductor fabrication, it will allow the industry to work with carbon nanotubes at a greater scale and deliver further innovation for carbon electronics.

You can learn more in the animation below.

IBM Health Tech: Just What The Doctor Ordered

I’m going to stop focusing on golf and the Masters…err, work…I meant work…long enough to indulge in a few moments of celebration on this, World Health Day.

One of my fave IBM PR colleagues, Holli, reminded me of the fact that IBM had made another key healthcare related announcement recently, the first biodegradable nanoparticles that can seek out and destroy drug-resistant bacteria (and no, that did NOT come straight out of a Michael Crichton novel, although it sounds like it could’ve).

Earlier this week, IBM Research explained the ground breaking early research discovering new types of nanoparticles that are physically attracted like magnets to MRSA cells, ignoring healthy cells completely and targeting and killing the bacteria by poking holes in its walls.

Okay, Turbo, you’re thinking to yourself, so what?

So what, is that this discovery could greatly improve the effectiveness of medication, as this nano approach would be a fundamentally different mode of attack compared to traditional antibiotics.  And, I suspect, it could provide for some pretty cool-looking injection devices!

Remembering this is IBM’s Centennial, we’re also unveiling an “icon of progress” representing IBM’s contributions to fighting infectious diseases and contributions to world health.

A few reminders of those contributions: IBM helped bring to market the first continuous blood separator which led to treatment for leukemia patients; the first heart lung machine to keep patients alive during surgery; and the first excimer laser used in LASIK eye surgery…among many others.

IBM’s Health Focus Has Never Been Better

Consider this: One in every eight of the earth’s inhabitants will be over 65 by 2030, and more than one billion people are overweight and another 388 million people will die in the next 10 years from a chronic illness.

New ways to treat illnesses and and transform how healthcare is delivered around the world are critical for both the health of our populations and our economies.

Recognizing World Health Day, IBM is also applying it expertise to address public health issues such as in Cross River State, Nigeria, here biometric identification and solar energy are just a few of the technologies in use to provide access to free healthcare and reduce child and maternal mortality rates by a goal of 50 percent by the end of 2011.

Through the years, IBM has also created hardware and applications specifically designed to improve care, diagnosis and treatment of disease, and advance how medical knowledge is shared.

• Working with the World Health Organization, IBM precisely mapped outbreaks of smallpox in 1976. This effort contributed to the eventual eradication of the disease in the general population a few years later.
• In the early 1990s IBM and the University of Washington built a prototype of the first medical imaging system.
• IBM’s World Community Grid, released in 2004, continues to use pervasive networking and crowdsourcing to apply supercomputer levels of processing power to urgent healthcare and societal needs such as fighting AIDs, cancer and dengue fever and malaria.
• Using IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputing simulations, researchers at IBM and the University of Edinburgh are currently collaborating on lab experiments to design drugs aimed at preventing the spread of the HIV virus.
• IBM is working with Roche on new nanopore-based technology that will directly read and sequence human DNA quickly and efficiently. The technology has the potential to improve throughput and reduce costs to achieve the vision of whole human genome sequencing at a cost of $100 to $1,000.

The Diagnosis: Improving Healthcare-Related Information Flow

Today, IBM is turning its focus to healthcare transformation, helping entire countries develop new patient-centric models of care, connecting health information and enabling deep analytics of medical data.

At the heart of any healthcare transformation are electronic health records, the basic building blocks of healthcare efficiency.

IBM has a long history of creating and connecting systems to share patient information. When standardized and shared, electronic health records provide a powerful means of increasing accuracy and speeding the delivery of patient information to the point of care. They enable better collaboration, more complete records, and better service.

Advanced health analytics provides new insight into the treatment of disease, can speed discovery of new drugs and therapies, and empowers healthcare providers with better information to improve care.

IBM’s work to create smarter healthcare systems, optimized around the patient, is aimed at reducing medical errors, achieving better patient safety and quality outcomes and saving lives.

This year marks IBM’s centennial and healthcare continues to be one of its most important areas of industry focus. The company spends more than $6B a year on R&D, much of it on healthcare, and IBM is one of the few technology companies with large teams of physicians and other clinicians on staff to ensure healthcare’s most pressing needs are met.

Check out the video below to learn how IBM is helping harness the power of electronic medical records.

You can go here to learn more about IBM’s Centennial.

And don’t forget to schedule that physical!

IBM Improves Its Nanotechnique

IBM researchers have published a breakthrough technique in the peer-reviewed journal Science that measures how long a single atom can hold information, and giving scientists the ability to record, study, and “visualize” extremely fast phenomena inside these atoms.

The scientists at IBM Research in our Almaden Labs are using the Scanning Tunneling Microscope like a high-speed camera to record the behavior of individual atoms at a speed of about one million times faster than previously possible.

IBM researchers in Zurich invented the Scanning Tunneling Microscope in 1981 and were awarded the Nobel Prize for their efforts.

Since then, IBM scientists have been pushing the boundaries of science using the Scanning Tunneling Microscope to understand the fundamental properties of matter at the atomic scale, with vast potential for game-changing innovation in information storage and computation.

The ability to measure nanosecond-fast phenomena opens a new realm of experiments for scientists, since they can now add the dimension of time to experiments in which extremely fast changes occur.

To put this into perspective, the difference between one nanosecond and one second is about the same comparison as one second to 30 years. An immense amount of physics happens during that time that scientists previously could not see.

In addition to allowing scientists to better understand the nanoscale phenomena in solar cells, this breakthrough could be used to study areas such as quantum computing, which are radically different types of computers not bound to the binary nature of traditional computers but which instead have the potential to perform advanced computations that are not possible today.

Or information storage technology, which, as technology approaches the atomic scale, provides scientists the opportunity to explore beyond the limits of magnetic storage. This breakthrough specifically allows scientists to “see” an atom’s electronic and magnetic properties and explore whether or not information can be reliably stored on a single atom.

Hold On: This Gets Geeky

Since the magnetic spin of an atom changes too fast to measure directly using previously available Scanning Tunneling Microscope  techniques, time-dependent behavior is recorded stroboscopically, in a manner similar to the techniques first used in creating motion pictures, or like in time lapse photography today.

Using a “pump-probe” measurement technique, a fast voltage pulse (the pump pulse) excites the atom and a subsequent weaker voltage pulse (the probe pulse) then measures the orientation of the atom’s magnetism at a certain time after excitation. In essence, the time delay between the pump and the probe sets the frame time of each measurement.

This delay is then varied step-by-step and the average magnetic motion is recorded in small time increments.  For each time increment, the scientists repeat the alternating voltage pulses about 100,000 times, which takes less than one second.

In the experiment, iron atoms were deposited onto an insulating layer only one atom thick and supported on a copper crystal. This surface was selected to allow the atoms to be probed electrically while retaining their magnetism. The iron atoms were then positioned with atomic precision next to non-magnetic copper atoms in order to control the interaction of the iron with the local environment of nearby atoms.

The resulting structures were then measured in the presence of different magnetic fields to reveal that the speed at which they change their magnetic orientation depends sensitively on the magnetic field. This showed that the atoms relax by means of quantum mechanical tunneling of the atom’s magnetic moment, an intriguing process by which the atom’s magnetism can reverse its direction without passing through intermediate orientations.

This knowledge may allow scientists to engineer the magnetic lifetime of the atoms to make them longer (to retain their magnetic state) or shorter (to switch to a new magnetic state) as needed to create future spintronic devices.

“This breakthrough allows us – for the first time – to understand how long information can be stored in an individual atom. Beyond this, the technique has great potential because it is applicable to many types of physics happening on the nanoscale,” said Sebastian Loth, IBM Research, about the discovery. “IBM’s continued investment in exploratory and fundamental science allows us to explore the great potential of nanotechnology for the future of the IT industry.”

A Majorly Small Matter

Among IBM’s many nanotechnology milestones, its scientists won a Nobel Prize for inventing the Scanning Tunneling Microscope, devised methods to manipulate individual atoms for the first time – famously spelling the letters IBM with 35 Xenon atoms – developed logic circuits using carbon nanotubes, and incorporated sub-nanometer material layers into commercially mass-produced hard disk drive recording heads and magnetic disk coatings.

IBM’s current nanotechnology research aims to devise new atomic- and molecular-scale structures and methods for enhancing information technologies, as well as discovering and understanding their scientific foundations.

To learn more about this latest breakthrough, check out the following YouTube video (which includes some nanotech animations and interviews with our humans who explain the new technique).

You can also check out some pics from this technique here on Flickr.

Just don’t forget: It’s a small world after all.

Nano Land Down Under

I arrived in Sydney earlier today (Tuesday) with my merry band of IBM traveling colleagues.

We landed around 5:15 AM Sydney time, then promptly headed into town to grab a catnap.  As much as I tried to sleep on the flight from Singapore to Sydney, I was stuck in a middle seat bulkhead in coach class, and so sleep was cheap.

Thanks again to our colleagues in Singapore.  Our time together was brief but informative, and I look forward to returning there someday soon.

As to the Land Down Under, it’s my first visit here, but having seen a bit of Sydney now, it certainly won’t be my last.  The Sydney Harbour view is breathtaking, and yes, I saw the Opera House (it’s kind of hard to miss being right down the street from our hotel).

No bunyip sightings as of yet, but the week’s just getting started.

Even as I worked hard at getting small in my Qantas seat overnight, IBM scientists have been busy getting jiggy with their nanotechnology.

In fact, they’ve been so busy they created a 3D map of the earth so small recently that 1,000 of them could fit on one grain of salt!

They were able to accomplish this through a new, breakthrough technique that uses a tiny silicon tip with a sharp apex — 100,000 times smaller than a sharpened pencil — to create patterns and structures as small as 15 nanometers at greatly reduced cost and complexity.

This patterning technique opens new prospects for developing nanosized objects in fields such as electronics, future chip technology, medicine, life sciences, and optoelectronics.

To demonstrate the technique’s unique capability, the team created several 3D and 2D patterns, using different materials for each one as reported in the scientific journals Science and Advanced Materials:

• A 25-nanometer-high 3D replica of the Matterhorn, a famous Alpine mountain that soars 4,478 m (14,692 ft) high, was created in molecular glass, representing a scale of 1:5 billion.**
• Complete 3D map of the world measuring only 22 by 11 micrometers was “written” on a polymer. At this size, 1,000 world maps could fit on a grain of salt. In the relief, one thousand meters of altitude correspond to roughly eight nanometers (nm). It is composed of 500,000 pixels, each measuring 20 nm2, and was created in only 2 minutes and 23 seconds.
• 2D nano-sized IBM logo was etched 400-nm-deep into silicon, demonstrating the viability of the technique for typical nanofabrication applications.
• 2D high-resolution 15-nm dense line patterning.

You can learn more about this fascinating new development by watching the following video, which interviews several of the scientists involved in the effort.