An Engineer At The University Of Texas at Dallas Designs A Computer System Made Solely Of Carbon

An engineer from the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas has designed a computer system without the transistor. This novel computer system is made of carbon to replace transistor in the quantum computing's carbon spintronics model.

The engineer, Dr. Joseph S. Friedman is an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at UT Dallas. According to the news release from the University of Texas at Dallas, his invention will one day replace the usage of transistors in the electronic devices and computers. His concept of this quantum computing used carbon spintronics to control the movement of electrons.

“The concept brings together an assortment of existing nanoscale technologies," Dr. Friedman said about the carbon spintronics in his newly designed computer system. “This was a great interdisciplinary collaborative team effort.”

In working of the carbon spintronics, Dr. Friedman collaborated with his colleagues from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Central Florida and Northwestern University. The researchers from the University of Illinois are Jean-Pierre Leburton and Anuj Girdhar, who helped him providing the physics analysis, while a researcher from the NanoBioPhotonics Laboratory at the University of Central Florida, Dr. Ryan Gelfand provided a technology guidance. His professor from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern University, Alan V. Sahakian provided the system insight, along with Allen Taflove, Bruce Wessels, Hooman Mohseni and Gokhan Memik.

His design of the carbon spintronics computer has been published in the Nature Communication Journal. Dr. Friedman explained that for the time being, his computer system is still on the drawing board. However, he will soon make the prototype of his computer that used two-dimensional ribbon of carbon, known as the graphene nanoribbon.

The newly designed computer system used carbon spintronic as a logic gate in the circuit design. The carbon spintronic acts as a switch to control electron movement, similar to the transistors function in the current computer system.