Nanotechnology, by virtue of its dimensions, is conducive to interacting with light. USB3, with its optical interface, is an example of this transition. It has been said that the twentieth century was the era of the electron, and the twenty-first century will be the era of the photon. Because they are base metal alloys, their prices are low and remain stable. Nanomaterials are under development that essentially mimic the electrical and mechanical properties of gold. The recent spike in the price of gold is having a measurable effect on connector pricing. Gold is an excellent conductor, but needs to be a minimum thickness to adequately resist corrosion and add durability. Nanotechnology may even replace the ubiquitous gold plating found on the connectors of virtually every plug-in card. One of the major causes of power consumption and propagation delay in semiconductor circuits is the RC time constant of interconnects reducing R by a factor of 10 will confer significant benefits to conventional semiconductors. Values around 10 E-4 Ohm-cm have been measured, and they have stable current densities as high as 10 E12 A/cm 2. These materials are ballistic conductors with quantum behavior and exhibit exceptionally low electrical resistance. Most recent research effort has been concentrated on carbon nanotubes (CNTs).
In the near term, the most likely application of nanotechnology to semiconductors is in the area of interconnects. If realized in a full-sized memory, this would result in a five-fold increase in storage capacity. By exploiting phase change in the nanomaterial graphene, it is possible to obtain ratios of conductivity over 1 million. In a well-designed and fabricated flash memory, the ratio will be around 10,000. For solid state memories, an important metric of the material used is the ratio of change between the 1 and 0 states. Building traditional logic gates out of such devices is not sensible, but other decision-making architectures based on quantum devices are being developed. Once the device size approaches single atoms quantum physics comes into play - a transistor may, or may not, switch, depending on the prevailing statistics. It is well known that we cannot go on shrinking devices ad infinitum. The first of these is semiconductor devices themselves. Nanotechnology is likely to manifest itself in the semiconductor industry in two forms.
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Conventional crack propagation and consequent mechanical failure are impossible if the material dimensions are smaller than this. For example, the radius of the tip of a crack is typically tens of nanometers. Often the difference is manifest as a step change. Their properties are influenced by the laws of physics because the feature size is of the same order as the critical size for physical phenomena. To fit with the modern definition of nanotechnology, materials must exhibit properties that are different from those predicted by simple scaling of dimensions. A transistor made with 0.5µm technology does not behave in a manner greatly different to one at the 32nm node. Despite this, semiconductors are not traditionally classed as nanotechnology. Modern semiconductors are manufactured with feature sizes measured in nanometers.
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