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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.
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
Let's pack as many big words together as possible!
compositionally graded collector, base and emitter
pseudomorphic heterojunction bipolar transistor
--Mike Boos
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.
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.
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.
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If I found out who you were, I'd come bitch slap you.
First of all, this transistor was developed in the ECE dept, not CS.
As for CS, we're not droping in rankings. On the other hand, we shall be climbing very soon. We have the highest percentage (and number) of young faculty of any CS program in the world. I give us 2-4 years before you see the results of the rampant hiring over the past 2-3 years (15+ new faculty members), who are all pushing to get tenure over the next half-decade.
Finally, Mosaic, the original httpd and NCSA telnet were all "intented" at NCSA, not at CS department. However, they did hire tons of CS grad students on those project. Nonetheless, these 2-3 inventions are not the only things that make us prestigous, except maybe in the eyes of mainstream media and the lay man.
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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.
Another article covering it here [www.newscientist.org].
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......
And then MIT will loose to the high school kids from Phoenix.
I thought that was velocity. AFAIK, "speed" can also be used to mean "rapidity", that is how fast something happens. OTOH, "velocity" can only be used to mean how fast something moves, which is the definition you mention.
Great, just what I need, a manic-depressive CPU.
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?
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the researchers have demonstrated a speed of 604 gigahertz - the fastest transistor operation to date.
How does one measure 604 gigahertz? Just asking.
Assuming it's all about network communications and storage. I'm guessing you've never done any graphical apps with your machine. Those eat CPU's for lunch. I can peg even the fastest consumer machines available now with some of the stuff I work with. Just depends on what you do.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
why would they switch technologies after investing $50 billion a year in their CMOS foundries etc.
Hopefully, competition.
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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
...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!
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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
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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.
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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.
Reply to you and the poster immediately above:
;) By compositionally graded, they mean that the junctions between the n and p regions have a specific type of gradation. In other words, they aren't uniform. I can't explain this without pictures.
This actually makes perfect sense to me. One of the specializations I took at school was electronic devices, which details the flow of electrons in semiconductors. I'll try to explain it. It's a tough job without pictures.
Indium Phosphide and Indium Gallium Arsenide are the materials used to construct the device. Generic transistors use Silicon, and you've no doubt heard of Gallium Arsenide. These are just made from a different material.
The collector, base, and emitter are the three parts of a bipolar junction transistor. Colloquially, that's a "transistor". If you're talking about a MOSFET, you'd say "MOSFET". I'm not sure if you'd capitalize it when speaking.
Transit time is how long it takes for one electron to take the trip across the transistor. Current density is current over area. It is defined in many way, but it all stems from the true form of Ohm's law. (Not the V=IR that everyone is familiar with, but J = oE )
The pseudomorphic heterojunction BJT is just a specific description of the junction type. Like the other junction, there's now way I can describe this to you without a picture.
If you know what this guy is talking about, he is making perfect sense. Look up some books online and get ready to brush up your multivariate calculus.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
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
Bad for the planet? The planet doesn't care. We're just a thin scum on the surface.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
It's not the distance light can travel in that time period that matters. Typically its also not a "signal" every 1.6 picoseconds, its a change in polarity or electromotive force (i.e. Volts). You would utilize such a device more efficiently in class C operation, where the transistor is biased above ground, and only conducts for 180 degrees.
Think of it like a hose that you squeeze and let go of 600 billion times a second. The electrons don't have to necessarily change direction, just magnitude (and following ohms law, current) 600 billion times a second.
Lousy facepalm.