Scientists from Stanford University have built a computer that works on carbon nanotubes.

This new invention has enabled the engineers to move on from the traditional silicon semiconductors, which were a threat for performance advancement. Computers with carbon nanotubes will allow performance advancement.

"Silicon is great. It's very hard to beat. But when everything gets so small, it's not clear you can get high performance and energy efficiency from silicon transistors", said Senior Author and Stanford Electrical Engineer Subhasish Mitra.

Nanotubes are extremely small in size and equally complex to work with. Size of these carbon made tubes varies from less than 1 nanometer diameter to 50 nanometers. A nanotube is as many as 10,000 times thin when compared to a human hair. The length of nano tubes earlier was limited to thousands of nm, but now ranges to centimeters as well.

This team of engineers first developed a manufacturing process in order to separate the defective and uneven tubes, without checking them tube by tube.

The computer built by the team is only a basic model of the concept suggested by them. There are 178 transistors used in the making of this computer and each transistor has between 10 and 200 carbon nanotubes. The computer is enabled to run two programs at one point of time with several other functions like sorting and counting numbers.

The report of this new invention is published in the Nature Magazine.