Moore's Law Rescued: Stanford, Toshiba Create Fast Nanotube Chip

Fresh and cool from today's inbox: Electrical engineers from Stanford and Toshiba are the first to use nanotubes to wire a silicon chip that can run at commercial processing speeds of 800 megahertz. (For comparison, the typical iPhone runs at 700 megahertz, while PCs run at 2 to 3 gigahertz.) Some signals going through the integrated circuit reached speeds of 1 Ghz.

While there's still more work to do before creating commercial products, this breakthrough provides a way for Moore's Law of ever-doubling processing power to continue, despite our reaching the physical limits of how thin we can slice a copper conduit. Star Trek, here we come.

More geeky details are available in the Stanford article. If you're really geeky, the research paper was published today in Nano Letters.