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First Superconducting Transistor Created
holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports that the first working superconducting transistor has been created, by researchers at the University of Geneva. Field effect transistors with zero electrical resistance would allow much faster operations. Only drawback is they need to be supercooled, something that may be addressed by improving the materials used."
Sure, but you don't have to do it at room temperature, either. There are superconductors at Liquid Nitrogen temps. Certainly most MRI machines use Liquid Helium temperature superconductors. They, of course, cost millions of dollars, but they are still used quite frequently.
IIRC, LN costs about the same as milk (~$3/gallon). If the rate of evaporation wasn't too great, it would just be an on-going charge. Say it was 1 gallon/month, would only cost you about $36/year.
Obviously LN distribution isn't up to par with electricity, but in the "closer" term it certainly would be feasible for "industrial" applications. Like running the Internet backbone routers.
Never done much overclocking and had reason to investigate the alternative cooling systems that requires, like oil or water cooling or piezoelectrics? Those present substantial maintentance and disaster possibilities that are enough to scare away all but the most determined. It's not when fun when your water-cooling system springs a leak and wrecks components (both from direct water damage and from heat damage from the loss of necessary cooling).
Having LIQUID NITROGEN in my desktop PC would seem to present maintenance and disaster potential an order of magnitude greater than that: what if the enclosure ruptures and explodes like a capacitor? What if it leaks nitrogen into the room and asphyxiates my cat sleeping on the floor?
I doubt liquid nitrogen will EVER have a safe and practical place in computers in private homes.
Speed isn't only determined by on-state resistance. Capacitance & inductance matter too and will be the limiting factors for a theoretical transistor that's 0 resistance on and infinite resistance off. Such a theoretical transistor won't dissipate heat, so it won't get hot. However, heat will be dissipated somewhere else because current still must flow from high potential to low potential. Furthermore, transition times aren't arbitrarily fast, and during the transition, the transistor will dissipate resistive power; this could be a big problem for systems cooled below 4 K.
"Only drawback is they need to be supercooled, something that may be addressed by improving the materials used." - that last part is a bit of an understatement.
Is an understatement from the New Sensationalist (as it should properly be called) an oxymoron?
The New Sensationalist runs a story every couple of weeks about how some new breakthrough will revolutionize something or other in the next two years. Has anyone gone through their predictions like we do with psychics to see what their actual hit rate really is?
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
1 liter of LN2 is about 800 grams. Molar mass of N2 is 28g/mol, so 1 liter of LN2 is about 28 moles.
1 mole of ideal gas takes about 22.4 liters at STP, so 28 moles will displace about 600 liters of air. Not nice.
Oh, and the first sign of hypoxia is loss of consciousness.