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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.
Sweet, now the 250 Ghz's will be totally affordable.
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.
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?"
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.
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?"
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!
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
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."
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.