Slashdot Mirror
Experimental Transistor Breaks 600 Gigahertz
neutron_p writes "The goal of a terahertz transistor for high-speed computing and communications applications could now be within reach. A new type of transistor structure, invented by scientists at the University of Illinois, has broken the 600 gigahertz speed barrier.
A new type of transistor - built from indium phosphide and indium gallium arsenide - is designed with a compositionally graded collector, base and emitter to reduce transit time and improve current density. With their pseudomorphic heterojunction bipolar transistor, the researchers have demonstrated a speed of 604 gigahertz - the fastest transistor operation to date."
And is forced to pay for their replacement as well as 100 hours community service.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
can it be overclocked?
sulli
RTFJ.
their pseudomorphic heterojunction bipolar transistor
*blank stare*
What now? It's pronounced nu-cu-lar!
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Sure...it's fast now, but just wait until it goes into its depressive phase...
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Yeah, because after the first 600 GHz, the next 400 GHz are a piece of cake.
With their pseudomorphic heterojunction bipolar transistor,.... Yes, but did they have to reverse the polarity?!
Who now with the what now?
Just in time for Longhorn!
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
Can I find these at CompUSA?
If we assumed that all transistors on a chip (say a P4) were this type of transistor, and could run at 600 GHz, I know there is time required for a signal to cross all of these transistors, etc., and that some chips have a billion transistors on them, how fast could the current chips run with these transistors?
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
They're building this super chip to play doom.
was how fast the site was /.ed
Let's pack as many big words together as possible!
compositionally graded collector, base and emitter
pseudomorphic heterojunction bipolar transistor
--Mike Boos
WTF? I commented on the college licence buy and it appeared here. Will someone *please* fix slashdot's HTML code and backend?
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
As a UIUC graduate in CS, I was very proud of their glory days of creating Mosaic and the birth of Apache (or what became apache)...
I still love how IE's help gives props to the university of illinois...
But they've been dropping from the rankings these days.. could this be a return to their hey days of "we invented the internet!"
Let's hope.. I feel ashamed to hang with the Melons and MITes..
Foo
What's the power usage on this thing? For one transistor it doesn't matter too much, but remember that todays chips have billions of transitors in them- Intel's Prescott core is rediculously power comsumpive right now. Even worse, over 100 watts of the power is lost to heat! So, what's the power and thermal design power of these things?
They'll be clearly the best engineering team, but will lose in the finals to the more talented squad from MIT.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
sits and waits for the "I'D LIKE TO PLAY HALF LIFE 2 ON THAT!!!" comments to start rolling in.
see subject
The funny thing about this is that in six years it will standard in every desktop and used for word processing.
More and more we here about these new HBT circuits that are faster than all get out.
The truth is that nothing will replace CMOS anytime soon. The infrastructure is already there, and it is being optimized over and over again and has a huge work force to man it.
I once heard someone ask Intel is they ever plan to switch to HBT for speed. Their response is, and will probably be for a while, that why would they switch technologies after investing $50 billion a year in their CMOS foundries etc.
These advancements may never make it to the point that the average consumer will take notice of them.
And it may be that these academic inventions will never find any market relevance.
What if gamma ray hits transister every 3 clock cycles? What then?
bipolar transistor
Sounds like my roommates trying to do math!
I really hate when people apply the word "speed" to computers. Speed = Distance / Time, it has nothing to do with computers unless you're throwing one out of the window.
Hertz is a measure of frequency, cycles per second. The computer industry is in dire need of an education in basic measurement terms.
Now that it's /.'ed... anyone? :(
600GHz, great. But how practical (read cheap) is it to make? We can make lot's of fast stuff, but until it's cheap fast stuff, it doesn't mean squat to Joe Schmoe. The same also applies, to some extent, to "high-end" applications. Some of the stuff that comes out of universities and what not are wildly inpractical. Of course, I can't read the bloody artical, so who knows.
Man, that was Final Jeopardy's question last night! Where was this post when I needed it?
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
Silicon is widely available for current transistors. Are indium phosphide and indium gallium arsenide just as available, or are they the doping materials.
Will material prices be the main determining cost of chips made from these products?
I didn't RTFA -- it was slashdotted.
OK, I cannot RTFM right now as it is /.ed, but:
This sounds an awful lot like they are giving the zero-gain bandwidth of the transistor - the frequency at which the transistor does NOT amplfy a signal anymore.
So, at 599GHz the transistor will amplify a little. At 600 GHz the transistor takes as much power to drive the input as it is able to switch at the output. At 601 GHz the transistor takes more power to control than it can switch.
Given a 600 GHz zero-gain bandwidth transistor you ARE NOT going to make a 600 GHz clockspeed processor.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I can see barriers placed by the laws of nature -- the speed of sound, the speed of light, whatever -- or by some nice round number (100 km altitude or whatever), but 600 GHz? Was there some limit they didn't teach us in school?
I henceforth banish you forever to technocrat.net!
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
You know what they say...every 18 months our technological development increases 150x .....errr something....
Surround them with Pentium 4 prescotts to keep it cool.
The fact that it runs at 600 GHz doesn't mean that it has useful gain at that frequency. However, it would presumably be useful at 100 GHz. Let's see now, 100 GHz has a wavelength of about 3 mm. We have to treat any wire longer than 1% of the wavelength as if it were a transmission line. That would be 0.03 mm. I can (on a good day) get a resolution of 0.01 mm on a printed circuit board. Not much margin. Well how about waveguide? That's pretty small too. Darn. The guys who came up with this may have had an easier time than I will trying to use it. Time to check the pension and see if I can retire yet.
And even if not, we finally get that long awaited CPU capable of a full speed emulation of a 500GHz CPU!
built from indium phosphide and indium gallium arsenide
I mean, faster isn't always better.
...
If person A spends $6000 to buy a 600GHz PC with the same WiFi connection and HD storage as person B who spends $500 to buy a 200GHz PC with the same WiFi connection and HD storage, who won?
Classical economists - and even the neo-punks - would say Person B, who can now afford to outfit his PC with racing stripes and a goldfish bowl, and still go on vacation in France
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
How much do you want to bet people try to overclock it to get 600.000001 GHz?
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
But seriously, a previous poster had a point, what's the relationship between the speed of a transitor and the speed of a proccessor? Because 600GHz is a HUGE jump over 3.4GHz. If there's a 1:1 ratio, then a proccsoor of with 600GHz transistors would have 176 tiems the proccessing power over the current breed. A Beowolf cluster in a single chip!
Free MacMini
IMO you are correct that Intel/Microchip/AMD aren't going to change their processes without a damned good reason. But PC parts and logic circuits aren't the only thing transistors go into.
How about the RF modulators/demodulators in all cell-phones, the RF amps in same, the special-purpose chips, regulators, detectors, buffers, amplifiers, etc that mfgrs still crank out by the butt-load, etc?
Personally, I'd really get off on an op-amp designed around these puppies! Imagine the gain-bandwidth product (eff-sub-Tee)!
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
Will this get me high speed internet access?
Always put any new transistor technology in your webserver before announcing it on slashdot.
Anyway, if it will be used for CPUs, with 6000Ghz its good for another 16 years of Moore's Law.
I was unaware of this barrier.
They clocked it in a good mood, immediately after that it was seen moving along at only 20Ghz, then 200, then 600 again......
That was the last time I remember Bipolar transistors being hyped as the next revolution in CPU technology. Back then Exponential Technology http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/CIC/announce/1996/x7 04-533.htmlwas developing a PowerPC processor that was claimed would be able to run at the unheard of speed of 533MHz. The Mac fans of the time were drooling over the prospects for Pentium crushing performance.(About 200-300Mhz at the time)
BYTE magazine article from the time http://www.byte.com/art/9611/sec6/art14.htm
I don't know, but these words sound plenty dirty to me! Next thing you know, they'll be tryin' pseudomorphic homojunctions and be destroyin' electronic values ever'where! We got to stop 'em before they move in with their homojunctional agenda! Maybe we can examine tenure for them dang lib'ral perfessers.
That is all.
And then MIT will loose to the high school kids from Phoenix.
... just use *two* of these 600 GHz transistors.
600 + 600 = 1200
This is illegal in seven counties in Georgia.
Great, just what I need, a manic-depressive CPU.
We always seem to forget that all of our cool new toys carry an enormous environmental cost. Anyone have any idea if indium phosphide and indium gallium arsenide are better or worse for the planet than current technologies?
"Even worse, over 100 watts of the power is lost to heat!"... Hey, I have news for you: all the power is lost as heat.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
The bottleneck on systems now is wire delay, not transistor speed. Maybe this is different for applications other than personal computers, but say we had mass-produced CPUs based on 600 Gigahertz transistors, what would that mean? For that matter, what's the speed of today's transistors? Each pipeline layer is at least 10 transistors deep or so as it is, so they're at least 60 Gigahertz now...
Ooooo, Aaahhhh, a 10-fold increase...in computing terms that doesn't seem like much.
Someone in the know want to fill me in?
The answer is no
It looks like Longhorn's requirements will be fullfilled!!!
I just looked on Agilent's website and they don't seem to have any 600,000 MHz oscilloscopes for sale. I wonder how they tested this thing? A string of divider flipflops, perhaps?
Nexsan Technologies SATA RAID
This sounds like it's just the CPU. How about a bus speed in the gigahertz?
I bet it makes any OS running on it feel so much more Snappier(TM).
Interesting. If a 600Ghz transistor != 600 Ghz CPU, what's the spec for the transistors in the current 3 Ghz P4?
the researchers have demonstrated a speed of 604 gigahertz - the fastest transistor operation to date.
How does one measure 604 gigahertz? Just asking.
why would they switch technologies after investing $50 billion a year in their CMOS foundries etc.
Hopefully, competition.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Woah, wait... think about it. It's a Pseudomorphic Heterojunction Bipolar transistor!
Danger, Will Robinson!
sigh
I think at least half the words in there had to be made up. :)
paul reinheimer
.. what the "pseudomorphic heterojunction bipolar transistor" is after that operation, and which part of his body got operated.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
With their pseudomorphic heterojunction bipolar transistor, the researchers have demonstrated a speed of 604 gigahertz...
Yeah, I have a family member who's bipolar, so I can relate.
DiscDividers tabbed plastic CD dividers: divider cards f
can it run Doom 3?
I think Jimmy Fallon said it best on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" --
I can finally play Doom 3 on my Blue and White G3 Mac, yay!
"Faster transistors could facilitate faster computers, more flexible and secure wireless communications systems, and more effective electronic combat systems. "
Faster computers, maybe.
But, more flexible and secure wireless communication -> NOPE; that's up to software.
More effective electronic combat systems -> NOPE; also up to software. Unless you count doom.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
It's nice to see technology marching forward. But most of us were unaware that was such a thing as a 600 Gigahertz barrier. How does this advance affect those of us who consider 6 Gighertz systems to be the state of the art? If at all.
Beh, we've been doing that super-impressive
ST Voyager talk for decades here.
We can add this transistor to lets say a 400GHz transistor to get a 1THz transistor???? I would really hope soo cuz dat woul b ub3r 1337
now we can all download pr0n even faster :D
I read the summary, and everything after "A new type of transistor" blew me away. Was this description supposed to be some sorta test? You're only a real nerd if you can understand what this said. In that case, I just failed awfully, and my account should be deleted right now :\
I didnt RTFA either, BUT:
Both intel und amd have already demonstrated transistors with transition frequences (or a zero gain bandwith as you call it) of more than 2 THz (IIRC, the fastest one was 3.something THz, with a double base design).
So i dont think this would be worth mentioning if 600GHz were the transition frequency, so i guess its an actual usable for extreme HF signal processing.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
What you seem to forget is that where the linux box can stay on for the rest of the year, you will proceed to reboot your windows box mulitple times. And windows still can't beat the blazing speed of my crt powering up. But how you may ask, simple, the last time i rebooted Colon Powell was Secretary of State.
... pure 1337 ... pure 1337.
You forgot that windows calculator boots 3ns faster than linux version
I'm Bi-Polar you insensitive clod!
(no offense actually taken)
Get your Unix fortune now!
Aside from cost, I wonder what's the MTBF.
Does it run Linux?
It would be interesting to see if Linux can compete with commercial single-transistor operating-system like VxWindows or QNX.
At a few terahertz, I think the frequency of the electromagnet field around these transistors will be the same as red light, so the chips will glow. I dont know if they'll emit laser light.
Its funny how far we've come. We can use the individual waves of red light as a clock signal for our chips.... in the near future.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
...for the output (or input, for that matter) transistors in my really 133t stereo amplifier design with DC-to-light frequency response.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
CPUs have stalled out at about 4ghz overall clocking, cutting edge transistors seem to be hitting a wall at about 500-600ghz.
Now granted faster gate transitions make for faster CPUs, but multiple gate operations are necessary for each state change, add signaling and propagation delay and who knows what you can really clock the CPU at (I am not an Electrical Engineer).
Here is a page link claiming a record 562ghz transistor switching in Oct. 2002 article
here is another claimed record of 509ghz, Nov, 2003 article
Obviously at odds with the 2002 anoucment. Undoubtedly it should narrow its claim for a specific transistor type.
Here is a U of I annoucment calming a record 382 ghz Jan. 30, 2003 article
But expects 700ghz by early 2004 (I'm guessing they didn't make it).
Lets assume 562ghz in 2002, so we - drum roll please --- 7.5% increase in speed in 2 ½ years!
This is not going to keep Moore's Law humming along.
Even stranger, here are claims of TerraHertz transistors at Intel in 2002 article
Ironically, while googling for transistor or gate speed will show hundreds of hits, you can't actually find the switching speed for individual gates in a P4 or AMD chip. This stuff seems to be super secret stuff, and only the overall CPU clock it published. I wouldn't be surprised if the individual gates and transistors are transitioning at several dozens of ghz if not a couple of hundred or more. While Moore's Law death claims may have been premature 10 and 20 years ago, they may not be now.
I hope I'm wrong, I want my Holodeck Playstation 5 in 2015.
Letter To Iran
...built from indium phosphide and indium gallium arsenide - is designed with a compositionally graded collector, base and emitter to reduce transit time and improve current density. With their pseudomorphic heterojunction bipolar transistor...
Anybody else think this was copy & pasted from a lost Trek episode? Maybe if they embedded a phased tachyon pulse emitter the transistors could use inverted warp bubble conduits?
Finally, I can build my own [engaDGET] reteo-encabulator.
In an average living room there are 1,242 objects Vin Diesel could use to kill you, including the room itself.
Try Radio Shack.
...is how fast you can fry an egg on it when it's running.
"pseudomorphic heterojunction bipolar transistor"
Sounds like it needs to see a doctor!
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
How do they go about testing the speed on such a thing? If it is the fastest, wouldn't that prevent any testing device from being able to 'keep up' with the new transister and give accurate readings?
I worked with Milton Feng, the professor who did this work, at the University of Illinois. His work is very good. In grad school, his thesis advisor's advisor's advisor was the co-inventor of the transistor. (I say co- because William Shockley was in Europe when the transistor was invented.)
His advisor's advisor invented the LED.
His advisor worked on early technology for the HBT that Milton studies.
As mentioned earlier on slashdot, these are not transistors for processors. Better than that, parts of this technology can lead to better III-V based technology.
SpyMac reports Apple intends to ship a Power Mac G6 with a 600 GHz processor by Macworld San Francisco '06, thus bringing the company back into harmony with Satan.
Oh, and just to piss off right-wing Windows users, Steve has decided to celebrate 29 years of Apple with a retro pricing scheme of $666 for "Hellspawn," as the new system has been code-named.
An Apple representative did not deny the story, saying that "company policy is not to comment on unannounced products." Clearly, it must be true.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
Filters of known frequency response can be made by knowing only their geometry. Pass the signal through several filters of different frequency responses (one at a time) and feed the output of the filter into a resistive material. Measure the temperature of the resistive material. The peak frequency of the filter which warms the resistive material the most is the (approximate) frequency being generated.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those.
We use lots of these on the Enterprise... for playing 3 level solitare.
But there's no "barrier" at 600 GHz or any other nice round number. It's just a number, and I wish tech writers and marketeers would quit using the "barrier" word in cases like this.
I don't build chips. I build printed circuit boards. My world currently ends at about 30 GHz.
Actually, hundred GHz speeds are going to be a problem for chip makers for the reasons I cited in my post. Currently, logic chips get a bit of a free pass because they are small relative to a wavelength. As the speeds go up, interconnects on the chip itself are going to become the same kind of problem that we now have with external connections.
Fool.
XP was faster? By how many milliseconds? Even if it was a FULL MINUTE faster than Linux, why would I want to use Microsoft's shoddy, buggy, unsecure, closed-source proprietary, blue screen of death piece of crap, expensive, vendor lock-in crapware!
So take your little benchmark and shove it up your ass.
Faster computers means better means to break into those secure wireless systems!
My GigaHertz chip can beat your TeraHertz chip.
On a serious note, what is the heat output on this monster?
correct me if i'm wrong, but 604 GHz means that it's sending out a signal every 1.6 picoseconds. light can't even travel half a millimeter in that time. unless we find a way to build dandruff sized computers, is this useful to anyone in any way?
How did they measure this?
The wavelength of 600GHz is only half a millimetre (if I got that right). That means you could make an inverting oscillator by looping the output back to the input with a quarter millimetre piece of wire.
The wavelength issue is going to make design with these in digital circuits a real challenge. It will take a few orders of magnitude in process improvement to exploit these to the max.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I think we just found the next google competition, at least it's more fun to say than nigritude ultramarine.
Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?
Our hero, Milton Feng, has discoverred a plot by the evil Terahertz gang to break the Universe's barier.
Pseudomorphic, the evil gang leader, has invented a new device to break through the barrier. "I will cause the failure of all the communication devices and computers." He cries. His sidekick, Heterojunction, says "I will collect the indium the we need to finish our ultimate machine!"
Pseudo's girlfriend, Bipolar Transistor, has a bag full of arsenide and is on the lookout to kill anyone foolish enough to interfere.
Milton stealthily invades the enemy base, where he overhears that the Terahertz gang will strike the bandgap in selected areas. After he finds this out, he speeds his electron flow to warn the others.
But what he doesn't know is that while his group of heroes is made of dissimilar and equally spunky men, the Pseudomorphic has his gang thoroughly doped.
Can our hero improve the compositional grading of the transistor components enough?
Or will the PseudoMoprh defeat them with his awesome signal charging time?
Find out on the next episode of "Moore's Law"!
-Ben
I'm surprised no one has noted that indium is rare enough that this transistor wouldn't be practical. Most of the indium is used in the transparent electrode (indium tin oxide) for LCD screens, etc. and it's in very short supply. Certainly not like silicon.
Time to upgrade again
2D or not 2D, ...
That 'tis the question
Whether 'tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of ATI open source drivers
Or embrace Nvidia and end them
Aye, there's the rub
now the chip speed is limited mainly by the interconnect signal propagation time. How fast an electron runs? about the speed of light: 3x10^8 meter per second. 1GHz clock = switch once each 1 nano-second. 1 nano-second = 1x10^-9 second.
so 1x10^-9 x 3x10^8 = 0.3 meter. or about a foot. 3.4GHz signal can travel about 4 inches within one switch. now you can do the math, how close the transistors have to be to meet the speed requirement.
I'm all for pure science, but I like to understand whether a technologies is intended as pure science of if it's intended as applied.
Now a bipolar transistor as far as I know has very little application anymore. After all, what's teh benefit of switching at 600ghz on its' own. You would need to develop a circuit of some type to benefit from it.
I don't see a bipolar transistor being useful in radio transmitters, though I can't explain why. I just imagine the input signal would need to be of a high resolution for the radio to make use of it.
I don't see it useful in computers, 245 million bipolar transistors would require their own power station.
I don't see it useful in much of anything. It seems to me a 604ghz mosfet would be far more interesting.
...especially since 1THz is in the far infrared spectrum.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I can't wait to fire up Half-Life 2 on that bad boy.
Society never gets more or less violent, the definition of violent just keeps changing.