IBM creates nanotubes that stand up straight

Paul Marks, chief technology correspondent

A few weeks ago I was at the IBM lab in Zurich, Switzerland, getting an update on Watson, solar desalination and how magnetic tape will store the big bang's big data. But I was surprised to find the lab's director, Matthias Kaiserswerth, was not nearly as excited as I had expected he would be over the prospects for graphene, the two-dimensional wonder material whose pioneers won the Nobel prize for physics in 2010. Now I know why: IBM has other ideas for the future of electronics.

It turns out IBM has been quietly continuing research on carbon nanotubes, the rolled-up-chicken-wire form of carbon that was the wonder material du jour in the decade before graphene's electronic properties were realised.

A coloured scanning tunnelling micrograph of carbon nanotubes - rolled sheets of carbon atoms, magnified 6 million times. Individual atoms are seen as the bumps on the surface of the tube (Image: Eye Of Science/SPL)

Now the company has revealed what it believes could be the answer to the problem that has dogged nanotube electronics all along: how to pick up the dastardly items -?which are only 1?nanometre in diameter - and put them where you want them. They may be great transistors, but if they cannot be placed on a chip they are useless.

Instead of a slavish and hellishly slow pick-and-place operation, IBM's trick is to encourage the nanotubes to organise themselves, with help from some clever chemical engineering.

First the engineers created a solution of nanotubes, coating them with a surfactant that encourages them to dissolve in water. Into this nanotube solution?they dipped a silicon dioxide chip carved with hafnium oxide trenches. The process coaxed one nanotube tube into each trench - where the nanotube bonds to the hafnium oxide - creating regular arrays of nanotube-based transistors at a density of 1 billion per square centimetre.

There's a good decade or more to go before they'll know whether this is the technology that'll let nanotubes break silicon's microchip monopoly, but fixing the tubes in place at least gives researchers something to work with. There's more over at the BBC.

Journal reference: Nature Nanotechnology, DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2012.189

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