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.

Comments

Depends...

[raehl]

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.

How do you measure things that fast

[azpcox]

If it's the fastest transistor out there, how can you measure teh switching speeds with something slower?

Re:Misinterpreted

[wannasleep]

Just to complement what Takahashi has said, I would like to point out that:

even if you could put them into a computer (that would consume more than the rest of the building) it wouldn't go that fast, because you need to build gates with those transistors and put some of those gates together to form a path between registries. The frequency of the computer is the inverse of the time that a signal needs to go from one register to another in the slowest path in the worst case conditions

The modern FETs actually have current flowing through the gate and the leakage is actually on its way to become the primary source for power consumption. This is due to the fact that the oxide is getting thinner and thinner and it can't make it to insulate anymore

Because of the leakage problem, we will have a change in the devices, sooner or later, although we have been saying the same thing for 20 years :)

We will have lighting revolutions next

[mnmn]

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.