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Researchers at IBM have overcome an important obstacle to building computers based on carbon nanotubes, by developing a way to selectively arrange transistors that were made using the carbon molecules. The achievement, described in the current issue of Nano Letters, could help make large-scale integrated circuits built out of carbon nanotubes possible, leading to ultrafast, low-power processors. For decades, the size of silicon-based transistors has decreased steadily while their performance has improved. As the devices approach their physical limits, though, researchers have started looking to less conventional structures and materials. Single-walled carbon nanotubes are one prominent candidate -- already researchers...

Nano-transistor self-assembles using biology A functional electronic nano-device has been manufactured using biological self-assembly for the first time. Israeli scientists harnessed the construction capabilities of DNA and the electronic properties of carbon nanotubes to create the self-assembling nano-transistor. The work has been greeted as "outstanding" and "spectacular" by nanotechnology experts. The push to shrink electronic circuits to ever smaller dimensions is relentless. Carbon nanotubes, which have remarkable electronic properties and only about one nanometre in diameter, have been touted as a highly promising material to help drive miniaturisation. But manufacturing nano-scale transistors has proved both time-consuming and labour-intensive. The team,...