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IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced a research breakthrough that could soon permit replacing silicon transistors with carbon nanotubes in future high-performance electronic chips.

Carbon nanotubes consist of single atomic sheets of carbon rolled up into a tube. The carbon nanotubes form the core of a transistor device whose superior electrical properties promise several generations of technology scaling beyond the physical limits of silicon. The IBM researchers developed a fabrication process that permits overcoming previous obstacles in nanotube electronics manufacturing.

“These chip innovations are necessary to meet the emerging demands of cloud computing, internet of Things and Big Data systems,” said Dario Gil, vice president of Science & Technology at IBM Research. “As silicon technology nears its physical limits, new materials, devices and circuit architectures must be ready to deliver the advanced technologies that will be required by the Cognitive Computing era. This breakthrough shows that computer chips made of carbon nanotubes will be able to power systems of the future sooner than the industry expected.”

In fact, IBM is betting on next-generation applications that need ultra-powerful computers. In particular, IBM is betting big on the coming era of cognitive computing – computer systems that understand the world in the way that humans do. As recently reported by Amigobulls, IBM is expanding its Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform Watson, with new Application Programming Interfaces (API) for cognitive computing. The planned applications of cognitive computing, which include machine learning, computer vision, and natural language understanding, are very computationally demanding and will need very high performance computer systems both on premise and in the cloud.