Slashdot Mirror
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.
...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
Sweet, now the 250 Ghz's will be totally affordable.
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 ...
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.
True -- but you can't use these on a normal chip. The potential pitfalls are huge... you need to be able to get enough of them into a small space, you need to be able to dissipate the power, the manufacturing process needs to be cheap enough to be economically viable... and so on.
A single transistor isn't all that impressive by itself :-)
(Actually, does anyone know how fast the transistors on desktop processor are? Each clock cycle has to wait several transistor delays, after all.)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Indeed. There are hardly enough reference points to make a reliable extrapolation. If I extrapolated backwards in the same way, I would go negative in the nineties (and that's just impossible).
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?"
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... :(
> I thought they may be pissing away their money on something
> stupid and useless like bettering humanity.
You'll never better humanity by spending money on technology.
Ah, grasshopper: when you understand that the answer is "both" and "neither," then you will be on the path to entanglement.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
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
How does a faster transistor have anything to do with Moore's law. Moore's Law is all about doubling the number of transistors every 18 months. It has nothing to do with how fast those transistors are.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
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
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."
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.
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.
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