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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.
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.