First computer made of carbon Nano Tubes

The days of silicon’s reign may be numbered. A team has built a computer using carbon nanotubes.

The computer is rudimentary by modern standards: it contains just 178 carbon-nanotube-based transistors to the billions of silicon-based switches in modern chips. It operates on only 1 bit of information, where today we rely on 32- and 64-bit machines. And it clocks in at just 1 kHz, about a million times slower than the application processors we find in modern smartphones.

Cedric's vital statistics

• 1 bit processor
• Speed: 1 kHz
• 178 transistors
• 10-200 nanotubes per transistor
• 2 billion carbon atoms
• Turing complete
• Multitasking

"People have been talking about a new era of carbon nanotube electronics, but there have been few demonstrations. Here is the proof," said Prof Subhasish Mitra, lead author on the study.

They have exceptional properties which make them ideal as a semiconductor material for building transistors, the on-off switches at the heart of electronics.For starters, CNTs are so thin - thousands could fit side-by-side in a human hair - that it takes very little energy to switch them off.