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UIUC Creates World's Fastest Transistor Again
An anonymous reader writes "The University of Illinois has developed (again) the world's fastest transistor operating at over 500 GHz. They used an indium phosphide based wafer, and super-scaled dimensions. The device kind of looks like a spaceship." Milton Feng, the professor in charge of the team behind the transistor, admits that their ultimate goal is a terahertz transistor, which given their previous achievements, doesn't sound too lofty.
now just get hard drives to transfer data that fast and we'll be set to actually use all that clock speed!!
...a computer composed completely of energy. Bypassing electrons, protons, completely. Why do we have to do "hacks" on matter for computers?
...a beowulf cluster of these?
...Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these! or better yet, can this fit into a Powerbook?
every time a republican dies a queer angel gets his wings
Same amount of people they can kill using the internet?
Wow Moore's Law at its best. I wonder what is the cost for manufactoring those, perhaps too much to mass produce?
A jump from 3ghZ to 500+ghZ isn't really spot on with Moore's Law is it? This is far from mere doubling.
Sweet, now the 250 Ghz's will be totally affordable.
"During the past year, high-speed transistor records have fallen like dominoes on the Illinois campus."
January: 382
May: 452
October: 509
I'm no statistics expert but extrapolating those results I estimate they'll top out at 690 in June 2005
I'm sure Gordon Moore is rolling in his grave! Wait, he isn't dead yet...
DARPA funds a lot of scientific research. This is a good thing. It doesn't neccessarily affect them directly, but advancements such as this will likely benefit everyone, so it's worth it for them to put money into.
Also, it isn't a chip, it's a single transistor.
When I started designing hardware circuits, the world was much more beautiful. You could understand everything that your small micro-processor based system did, downto the function of the BJTs in the TTL devices down there... Then Intel started the 1GHz race and I had to learn a great deal of RF techniques to just design my next PCB. And now 500GHz?!!! At this rate, a few years later I'll have to learn more about RF and then eventually optics than next hot FSM synthesis algorithm! I guess I'd better change my job, start something more calm and steady, like paiting or ...
All you do is put two together? thats 1 terrahertz.
Why aren't people logical?
Will we all need an Asetek VapoChill to keep chips using these things cool?
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
as many will sit in a spaceship with dubs
From the article:
150 nm, 382 GHz
100 nm, 452 GHz
75 nm, 509 GHz
At their current rate of improvement, a 680GHz device will have a collector size of 0 nm. Just imagine what will happen once they manage negative sizes!
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
The University of Illinois has developed again the world's fastest transistor operating at over 500 GHz
If only they had documented the damn thing, they wouldn't have to develop it twice!
If it takes 12 years for these new transistors to make it into commercially available processors, then it would be spot-on with Moore's Law.
Was the fastest transistor 12 years ago 3 GHz? Probably.
paintball
Their latest device, with a frequency of 509 gigahertz, is 57 gigahertz faster than their previous record holder and could find use in applications such as high-speed communications products, consumer electronics and electronic combat systems
Or to be a little less specific: uh, pretty much everywhere where electronic transistors are used today.
which are built from silicon and germanium, the Illinois transistors are made from indium phosphide and indium gallium arsenide.
Maybe they should call Champaign Indium Phosphide Valley.
-Seriv
(it is stupid I know)
."The steady rise in the speed of bipolar transistors has relied largely on the vertical scaling of the epitaxial layer structure to reduce the carrier transit time," said Milton Feng, the Holonyak Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois, whose team has been working on high-speed compound semiconductor transistors since 1995. "However, this comes at the cost of increasing the base-collector capacitance. To compensate for this unwanted effect, we have employed lateral scaling of both the emitter and the collector."
I mean, that's just blindingly obvious.
By all the compound words in there, I'm pretty sure this has been nicked from star trek!
Earlier today, the blazing speed of the transistor was put to the test to pull apart the makeup of the sought-after "Flaming Homer"
Prof. Frink of the University of Illinois had this to say...
"Brace yourselves gentlemen. According to the new transistor, the secret ingredient is...Love!? Who's been screwing with this thing?"
This isn't a FET like the transistors found in computers (and just about everything else). This is bi-polar technology that uses much more power than FET. They're looking for speed only to make possible very demanding applications like direct microwave processing.
Moore's law observes that the NUMBER OF TRANSISTORS, not the speed, grows exponentially. If you believe it's speed that grows exponentially, you've fallen victim to bad journalists who've fallen victim to evil marketers.
At least as many as the internet, they funded that too.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Too bad current Computer Technology doesn't use indium phosphide and indium gallium arsenide. It would take years for fabs just to adjust to a new material and yield decently.
Also as someone stated, it's just one transistor not the hundreds of millions that are in current technology (all acting in "harmony").
Then again, this is a great discovery and a step in the right direction. I'm very proud of my Alma Mater. Too bad I didn't have a class with Professor Feng.
At 1 THz, it will take more than 40 clock cycles for a signal to move across a 1/2 inch die of the CPU. And it will take 320 clock cycles for a round-trip to a memory location just 2 inches away. (And that is assuming the signals travel at the speed of light in a vacuum, not the slower speed found in metal traces or optical fibers.) Should make it interesting for chip designers.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
So what's the vote: will RF designers be obsolete, or will digital designers have to become RF designers?
I looked around and didn't come up with any. Has anyone seen the real papers on this stuff? It'd be interesting to see the transfer characteristics of this transistor.
There should be a factory nearby that could need these.
So, how far from the university is the HAL plant?
It seems like every time an article like this is on slash dot a million people say "wow I can't wait for a computer using that technology".
What people _don't_ understand is this is not the same technology as is used in a microprocessor. CPUs used Field Effect Transistors. The advantage of FETs is that there is no gate-drain current when the transistor isn't switching so they take very little power. With a bi-polar transistor, you are using a current switch, which would take massive amounts of current if you put many of these into an IC.
A more realistic application would be in communications systems where your carrier frequency is at 500Ghz.
Sorry to burst your bubble but you won't see 500Ghz computers next year. Maybe not ever using CMOS.
How do you package a 500 GHz transistor? And I thought UHF transistors and stripline construction was exotic stuff.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
you're an ASS. you think DARPA just funds projects so they can go around killing people? grow up.
I work for the Iraqis and am therefore posting anonymously. While this was done on purpose, it was by a sole Iraqi battalion, and not a decision by Iraq. That battalion has since been rewarded with the highest medal possible, the Iron Shit and Blood Encrusted Cock (ISBEC).
Hey me too!!!
"Indium GaAs is the technology of the future - and always will be."
Sounds great, can't wait to see it in commercial use, but I'm not holding my breath.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
it's a 509GHz *TRANSISTOR*, not a chip. even for the transistors on a P4, they also operate at a "speed" much faster than the actual chip operations - after all, to squeeze 3+ GHz out of a chip, which has tons of gates connected one after another, isn't exactly a "everybody switch at once" deal.
besides, for real high speed stuff people are moving toward serial on PCB anyway, parallel just doesn't work anymore past a certain point due to the increased capacitance that's caused by traces getting tighter with eachother (need more traces for more pins)...
Almost all (i'd wager to say "all" but there might be some tiny companies i don't know about) FPGA manufactures include serdes (serializer / deserializer) ports on their chips, usually more than one - those go at 6+GHz (faster ones due out are 10GHz), but PCB still handles that because it's only a few pins compared to, a DDR bus.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I hear it contains an entire bit of storage, but, sadly, it's volatile.
--- Ban humanity.
Obviously the submitter is a Dr. Who fan.
DARPA is a research arm staffed heavily by scientists, so it's perhaps a little more noble than its DoD links might suggest. The Internet is an obvious example: DARPA invented the Internet to distract computer nerds from procreation, to the benefit of future generations.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
If it's the fastest transistor out there, how can you measure teh switching speeds with something slower?
What exactly do you mean by "Don't touch this button?"
IANAS (I am not a statistician ;) )
If you go by percent increase, they've been averaging 115.5% increase every 4.5 months.
If they keep that up, they'll hit 588GHz in March 2004, 679GHZ in late august 2004.
By June 2005, they'll be breaking 900GHz.
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
While it's wonderful that they can create a 300fs inverter, you also have to consider that they have yet to prove that they can actually mass-produce these structures to get adequate yields. This is not a trivial operation. Bell Labs, IBM, Intel, and AMD have all announced ultra-small and/or ultra-fast transistor structures, but they all admit that they are far from mass-producing them on a wafer/die.
Also - the rest of the componentry in a computer or other electronic structure, and how it will all communicate all of these calculations, will also be a problem. Already, integrated circuit I/O circuits are having trouble transporting data back and forth on a PCB.
ALSO, consider that the photolithography tools that are supposed to support the next generation of smaller structures are already off-track. 157nm lithography tools have been delayed due to development and financial difficulties.). My personal guess is that the vertical MOSFETs will be the winners in the short term because, until they get other trinity and neo die a truce is made the matrix cointinues to exist factors in line, they will have to make do with what they've got, though *again* the additional processing required for the wafer will impact yields, so it will be an expensive technology to implement either way.
A spaceship would be GW Bush's description.
Looks like a transistor to me.
They are six years late allready, about time they're trying to catch up!
I think HAL is still the most interesting thing to come out of Urbana-Champaign... See this site for more information.
Faster transistors would enable the creation of faster computers and video games
Wow, as long as it's being done for something important like video games. I thought they may be pissing away their money on something stupid and useless like bettering humanity.
I lived with one of the grad students for 4 years. I like to think me and the other Special Sauce Ninjas had a lot to do with his development as an undergrad. Our constant harrassment helped him develop an amazing resolve and the willpower to ignore any temptation in the face of his work.
Congratulations, Fleetwood.
DARPA invented the Internet to distract computer nerds from procreation, to the benefit of future generations of military recruiters and officers.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Oh shit. I have a test on transistors (ECE 340, Solid State Device Electronics) tonight and attend UIUC...they better fucking not test us on this... :(
So it means that I'll need to buy a new comp to run Longhorn at a decent speed ?
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
"Hey babe, my transistor swicthes at 509GHz thats GHz not MHz"
Chicks just don't appreciate fast transistors anymore.
which means (even if they produce a FET version) it's still going to have the terrible electrical characteristics we see in today's transistors. Lots of bleeding and heat in the off state. I'd much rather see people focusing on something like Intel's trigate transistor. While current transistors can handle and 8 or 10 ghz CPU, nothing will dissipate the KWatt or so the chip would dissipate.....
y=3000/x^0.4
where x is size (nm), y is speed (GHz). 1000GHz will be reached at ~15nm.In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
The speed at which memory transfers over a bus to a CPU does not grow at this rate. We need to change some fundamental architecture pretty soon.
This isn't the article I'm thinking of but it's
close.
There was one with a graph of the two growth rates. I'll keep looking.
...are they going to start using this thing to monitor the 50 year old power grid I rely on every day?
Bastard.
Moores law has numerous interpretations.
It can be stated in terms of number of transistors, speed, cost, or amount of memory. If you have a link stating why the number of transistors is the preferred interpretation, I'd be interested to see it.
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
Mass unproductivity... close enough to dead, but without the bad press.
I might be mistaken, but isn't galliumarsenide a superconductor? (Mind you, at really low temperatures.)
And if so, i wonder how much faster it would run if they'd cool it down to the point where it starts to superconduct.
Everyone knows manic-depressive electronics (think Marvin from HHGTTG) are inherently unstable.
Any vibrating electric signal emits radio waves. Radio waves at higher frequencies become light.
So its interesting to see the transistors gaining higher speed. Visible light is 384 to 769 THz, so the whole circuit spontaneously glows red and passes all rainbow colors to violet, then grows dark again as we speed up the circuit. This is probably the most efficient way to produce light anyway.
So we'll have blubs that will provide us with a wide spectrum of lights just as daylight and LCD monitors with insanely high resolutions and color bits
Not to mention CPUs that emit UV light at night.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
because that's what mr Moore actually said
Advanced users are users too!
You can check out Gordon Moore's original paper via this Intel site -- http://www.intel.com/research/silicon/mooreslaw.ht m -- which says Moore's Law refers to "an exponential growth in the number of transistors per integrated circuit..." The notable chart in the paper itself has on the vertical axis: Log (base 2) "of the number of components per integrated function."
"My personal guess is that the vertical MOSFETs will be the winners in the short term because, until they get other trinity and neo die a truce is made the matrix cointinues to exist factors in line,"
Sweet, very sweet.
http://www.intel.com/research/spotlights/terahertz bkgdr.htm
Not really clear if it has actually been RUN at a Terahertz, but it's implied to he capable technology
Jesus Christ, do you people even READ THE COMMENT YOU'RE MODDING UP? Somehow I don't find the matrix spoilers very "insightful".
This is good for academic study just to see what can be achieved but the industry should be focused on nano engineering and laying the foundations for optronic design. Processors are just too hot and power hungry; it's a dead end. Time to move into the 21st century with optical circircuitry.
I have little doubt that an equivelent optical pentium processor, or any other processor of choice, could be created now for a big chunk of change that would be 10 to 100 times more powerful at least, using at quarter of power though probably requiring the space of cabinet. The equivelent of old solid state computers. (I gaurantee you that at least the NSA and multitary have this already but their development rarely contributes to the commercial sector since they like to keep technology to themselves.) The commercial commutity should have already done this and have started refining the technology to reduce it to the size of a standard cpu case and be ready to release a product within a year. With such a new technology breakthroughs would happen daily yet anything produced would be more powerful while requiring less power.
Industry is behind where they should be because they are wasting time further developting lithography and smaller transistors. Optronics is a slam dunk and far more deserving to have the money thrown at it that is currently being spent pushing the limits of electronics.
I don't think professors at a university care so much about reliability.
AMD has produced a transistor that operates at 3300 Ghz ... 6.5 times faster than the supposed record holder in the above story. Sure, its a different kind of transistor, but the headline read fastest transistor, not fastest type xxx transistor.
Check It Out
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
I wonder how fast the Star Trek CPU is?
I remember that episode in Voyager where thier central computer was stolen. How fast was that cpu??
You didn't mention the part where it's revealed that Morpheus is a 'good-guy' agent and Neo, after he goes blind, must use his sonar powers to tell Smith where to shoot when fighting off the machines.
(I didn't see the Matrix 3, either.)
Disclaimer: I am not professor of EE (just undergrad)
Quote:"The steady rise in the speed of bipolar transistors has relied largely on the vertical scaling of the epitaxial layer structure to reduce the carrier transit time,"
Translation: bipolar transistors (BJTs) have gotten faster because they made them thinner (less distance for electrons to travel)
Quote: "However, this comes at the cost of increasing the base-collector capacitance. To compensate for this unwanted effect, we have employed lateral scaling of both the emitter and the collector."
Translation: Speed gained by making the transistor thinner was offset by the effects of increased capacitance (capacitance is proportional to area/separation, and they decreased the separation), so they made it skinnier as well (lowering the area) to lower the capacitance.
Summary: They made the transistor smaller, so it goes faster.
Anyway, based on the parent's comments, these are just BJT's (Bipolar Junction Transistors), which are fine for high speed stuff, but aren't used in computer processors or any of the stuff you would commonly think of using transistors in. BJT's have horrendous power consumption because they always use power constantly, while CMOS (which has replaced it) only uses power when it changes state.
This means that these advances will be great for communications and signal processing, but won't affect most of the electronic devices we know and love.
... in some ways, because most of the really high-speed transistors are BJTs. Since BJTs leak power constantly (not just when switching, as does CMOS), their application to entire chips is limited.
They are still useful in very small, critical, high-speed portions of chips, so that's great. But unless we can reach these speeds with CMOS (or some other kind of technology), then we're going nowhere anytime soon.
Extremely high switching speeds, the power dissipation of the active region load of the FET will exceed the power dissipation from the always-on BJT. For insanely high frequencies, BJT's may very well be more efficient. (I have not done even an order of magnitude calculation, so I may be innacurate on this point)
I stand corrected.
Thanks for the link!
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
You just have to have your communications interface with crystal oscillators, or low frequency LED's, or some other device that uses a slow frequency to pump essentially DC energy into a material that will generate high frequency oscillations, where E(bandgap)=hf.
Yes, yet another UIUC student here. ^_^
amazed at your application of math. both the linear and quadratic regressions on my ti86 said 1000 won't happen.
the quad came up with 680ghz (goal) at ~21.57nm and 768ghz was the y intercept.
i'm sure these people have other methods of upping the speed.
See also: DEC/Alpha
Maybe something of all these 'need for speed' is aiming for something that can calculate all possibilities in less than one second?
:D
This could be something of an aid to AI
Already, we see the speeds of these processors can do these days cannot be limited. Remember what the famous m$ guru said? "No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer. - Bill Gates said in the early 1970s "
Dude, I've been avoiding all the reviews...you just ruined $24 at the Metreon in SF on Sunday :-)
Babies are cute because they have to be.
It's only three points. You can draw an awful lot of curves through three points.
[disclaimer: I know nothing of lab phisics, and it shows]
how do they test these devices? what kind of lab tools do they use? I mean, since this transistor is way much faster than any other, it seems a chicken and egg problem to me: to build a testing device, you would need some transistors (for amplification of the output of the tested transistor, or whatever) that are as fast as the tested device, possibly faster...
"The device kind of looks like a spaceship"?
Spaceships are a common commodity these days!
The speed they're talking about is typically GBP (gain bandwidth product), or the frequency at which the gain of the transistor is 1. It's not typically useful at a gain of 1 (for instance, if you want to fan it out to like transistors, it'll need to be at least n for n fanouts).
Good point
Each pipeline stage must complete in a clock cycle. However, say there's a propagation of say, 10 transistors for the output at the end of that pipeline stage to be valid
Very informative. This implies that the GBP of the individual transistors must be sufficient to handle the product of the fanout and length. A single-layer stage with a fan-out of 3 would require 9 GHz transistors to support a 3 GHz clock speed. If the stage has a length of 10, then we would need 90 Ghz transistors to support both the fanout and the length with a 3 GHz clock. (Actually the transistors need to be faster than 90 GHz to make up for propagation delays in the circuit).
So what is the GBP for transistors in the latest, greatest CPUs?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
log(y)=log(3000)-log(x)*.4 (approximately)
Of course I assumed specific type of dependence, and that speed goes to infinity as the size goes to 0. The speed might as well be bounded even if size 0 is reached.In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
Can one imagine just how hot this chip is?
"But Sir, it'sa onlee ah WAF-er theen meeent."
ILL.....
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
In theory, there is no difference between Yogi Berra and Albert Einstein. In practice, however, there is.
No, Bill did not actually say that.
Wired
1. Lets assume, for this example, that the DAC's resolution is 1 MHz. But you need 2 MHZ of resolution.
2. Get two DACs and send the same analog signal to both. Set the DACs to both sample, but only one at a time.
3. According to my math, each DAC will be sampling 10,000 times per second or 0.0001 or a second for each sample. DAC 1 will take a sample, then DAC will take another sample 0.00005 of a second latter, followed by DAC 1 again another 0.00005 of a second later and so on. In other words, multitask the sampling across two DACs. This can be expanded to use as many DACs as needed to get whatever resolution needed, all without have to spend millions of dollars developing a 500 GHz transister.
4. Profit!!!
You don't need faster transisters, just more of them.
This message brought to you by Jack Schitt's Previously Shat Shit
But will it make Format C: go any faster???
Cryolithic replied, "No, Bill did not actually say that."
Apologies for making a mistake in quotes for Bill in mentioning about quantom processors, which it was not true.
However, rumors have said about the capabilities in a processor that can attain or achieve something that has never done before.
Although Bill Gates did quote about not requiring more than a certain amount of memory. This has proven him wrong already.. and as a result that there is no limitations for capabilities of a human mind.