The Carbon Nanotube Breakthrough Moore's Law Needs to Survive? We'll See.

All of tech-dom’s aflutter with news that Stanford University engineers have built a functional processor out of carbon nanotubes. A very primitive processor, mind you, with number-juggling capabilities one of the Stanford engineers admits are roughly on par with the Intel 4004 — you know, Intel’s very first microprocessor, released nearly four decades ago. But the breakthrough here, outlined in the science journal Nature, is the shift from silicon to carbon, which could be both faster and...