Nanochips will mess up the physics of electronics, so a bunch of universities will research ways to keep chips on the shrinking bandwagon.
A cluster of universities – Glasgow, Manchester, Southampton, York and Edinburgh – have picked up an EPSRC grant of more £5.3 million "to design a new generation of 'nanoelectronic' circuits (chips) that will power the computers and mobile phones of the future". It is all a part of the relentless smallification of electronics. But the smaller you get, it seems, the messier the underlying science.
As the press release announcing the grant puts it, "In the next decade, transistors will not only be ten times smaller – they will also behave very differently. Two of today’s transistors, identical in shape and size, will behave in more or less the same way. That, however, will not be the case at nanoscale."
Put another way, nanotransistors will exhibit bad behaviour. Just the sort of thing that could upset anyone in the chips business. Which is why the project already has a sizeable industrial connection in the shape of two of the UK's largest 'fabless' chip design companies, ARM and Wolfson Microelectronics, as well as Synopsys which is "the world leader in design software" and a bunch of semiconductor chip manufacturers, Freescale, National Semiconductors and Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe.
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