SKIRMISHER

Aside from carbon nanotubes, it’s now nanowire transistors skirting past silicon in the race to create tomorrow’s cheap, high-performance electronics.

From Technology Review:

Researchers at Harvard University have shown that nanowire transistors can be at least four times speedier than conventional silicon devices… This could lead to inexpensive, high-performance, flexible electronic circuitry for cell phones and displays. It could also save space and further increase speed, he says, by allowing memory, logic, and sensing layers to be assembled on the same chip.

Says Peidong Yang, professor of chemistry at University of California, Berkeley:

Nanowires have been considered a promising contender for use on future logic chips because of their very small size (about 10 nanometers wide) and because they can be made without complicated lithography. Until now, though, the performance of nanowire-based transistors has lagged far behind that of other potential nano devices, such as carbon nanotubes, and even conventional devices. But the new Harvard research suggests that nanowires have surpassed conventional transistors and nearly caught up with nanotubes.

NANOWIRE TRANSISTORS FASTER THAN SILICON [TechReview]

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