Additionally, they addressed the challenges of metallic CNTs with the invention of a technique to remove these undesirable elements from their circuits.
To this end, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are a significant departure from traditional silicon technologies and a very promising path to solving the challenge of energy efficiency.
That promise, however, is yet to be realized due to substantial material imperfections inherent to nanotubes that left engineers wondering whether CNTs would ever prove viable.
The Stanford design approach has two striking features in that it sacrifices virtually none of CNTs' energy efficiency and it is also compatible with existing fabrication methods and infrastructure, pushing the technology a significant step toward commercialization.
Realizing that better processes alone will never overcome these imperfections, the Stanford engineers managed to circumvent the barriers using a unique imperfection-immune design paradigm to produce the first-ever full-wafer-scale digital logic structures that are unaffected by misaligned and mis-positioned CNTs.