For more than a decade, engineers have been fretting that they are running out of tricks for continuing to shrink silicon transistors. Intel's latest chips have transistors with features as small as 14 nanometers, but it is unclear how the industry can keep scaling down further or what might replace silicon. A project at IBM now aims to have an alternative, carbon nanotube transistors, ready to take over from silicon transistors soon after 2020. "That's where silicon scaling runs out of steam, and there really is nothing else," says Wilfried Haensch, who leads the project. Nanotubes are the only technology that looks capable of keeping the advance of computer power from slowing down, he says, by offering a practical way to make both smaller and faster transistors.
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