In a move which marks a notable advance in the direction of chip-making technology, the IBM research team at the T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N. Y., has recently reported the `nanotube chip' breakthrough.

According to a report in the Sunday edition of the journal Nature Nanotechnology, IBM researchers have successfully patterned an assortment of carbon nanotubes on the surface of a silicon wafer; and have developed chips using the nanotubes. These chips are essentially hybrids of silicon and carbon nanotubes with over 10,000 working transistors.

The latest `nanotube chips' breakthrough by the OBM researchers chiefly involved the replacement of silicon transistors with carbon nanotubes; with the result that the size of the transistors could be reduced considerably, thereby giving the carbon nanotube chips a noteworthy speed bump vis-a-vis their silicon-based counterparts.

With the nanometer-chip manufacturing process being currently compatible with the existing silicon-chip manufacturing process, Supratik Guha - IBM Research's Director of Physical Sciences - said in a statement that the key motivation for building carbon nanotube transistors was that "at extremely small nanoscale dimensions, they outperform transistors made from any other material."

However, Guha also noted that "there are challenges to address such as ultra high purity of the carbon nanotubes and deliberate placement at the nanoscale;" and added: "We have been making significant strides in both."