June 10, 2005 — A team of researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have demonstrated that carbon nanotube interconnects can quickly route electronic systems from one transistor to another. Their findings were published in the June 2005 issue of Nano Letters, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society.

“Our prior research showed that nanotube transistors can operate at extremely high frequencies, but the connections between the transistors were made out of somewhat slower copper, thus forming a bottleneck for the electrical signals,” said Peter Burke, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, who conducted the research along with graduate student Zhen (Jenny) Yu. The new research, he says, shows that nanotubes could be used to eliminate the bottleneck.

The Army Research Office, the Office of Naval Research, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation provided funding for the research, which took place at UCI’s Integrated Nanosystems Research Facility.