If Newns's ideas prove correct, and if still another kind of perovskite is used as a gate insulator, it may be possible to create perovskite-based transistors that could be both substantially smaller and faster than ordinary CMOS transistors. Many challenges must be met before integrated circuits based on this technology could be built at all, let alone surpass silicon chips in performance. Yet the preliminary results have been encouraging, and the underlying physical arguments in favor of pursuing such a program are sound. The idea originated with a 1974 proposal by Ari Aviram of Watson and Mark Ratner of Northwestern University to use a certain kind of molecule to pass electric current primarily in one direction, a function performed in electronics by a diode. A team at the University of Alabama succeeded in doing so in 1997.
Nanotubes can be semiconductors or metals depending on their detailed atomic structure.
That makes them ideal materials for interconnections as well as transistors. And for commercial applications, we need a different way of assembling the devices from the way we have used in the laboratory. Joe Jasinski, manager of nanoelectronics and optical science at Watson, explains the rationale behind the pursuit of self-assembly. But if you want to build a trillion identical patios, you need to get the bricks to somehow do the job themselves, to self-assemble into patios. We don't know how to get bricks to self-assemble, because there are no natural forces between bricks that are strong enough compared to the size and weight of the bricks to have an effect.