carbon nanotubes

We have to come up with a new name for Silicon Valley.

Don't get me wrong. It's not going away. The famous region at the southern end of San Francisco Bay will continue being home to the world's top high-tech companies.

It's just that we won't be able to call it "Silicon Valley" much longer.

After all, the region earned its nickname based on the type of material we use to make semiconductors for a wide range of computers.

And that material is going to have to change.

Of course, silicon still holds a huge lead over other substances in computer chip design. But there's a fundamental problem with silicon chips.

Engineers are running out of room on them.

You see, the Valley runs on a basic rule that has remained unchanged for many decades. It's called Moore's Law, and it states that computing power roughly doubles every two years.

This explains why your smart phone is a better, faster computer than the mainframes NASA had when it made its moon shots in the '60s.

To keep up with Moore's Law, we need to pack ever more transistors - the tiny switches used to control computers - on semiconductors. The current number stands at more than a billion (on an area smaller than a postage stamp). That's impressive. But at some point, the law of physics will limit how many transistors we can place on a piece of silicon.

It's fast getting to the point where we can't physically make transistors any smaller. And once we run out of real estate, the growth in processing power will hit a brick wall, in turn, slowing the entire pace of innovation around the globe.

That's why I'm glad to tell you today about a new computing breakthrough from International Business Machines Inc. (NYSE:IBM). They scored a huge advance that could soon put the tech world light years ahead of where we are today.

This novel new material is made of a very familiar substance...