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Can Transistors Be Made To Work When They're Off?
An anonymous reader writes "Engineers at the Belgian research institute IMEC are looking at the use of silicon transistors in the sub-threshold region of their operation as a way of pursuing ultra-low power goals. A chip the engineers are designing for biomedical applications could have blocks designed to operate at 0.2 or 0.3 volts, researchers said, according to EE Times. The threshold voltage is the point at which the transistor nominally switches off. Operating a transistor when it is 'off' would make use of the leakage conduction that is normally seen as wasted energy, according to the article."
The energy put into thinking about this would far outweigh any perceived benefits.
Indeed. All scientific research is utterly useless and wasted time unless it has immediate and forseeable tangible benefits.
You're just a fucking ignorant moron.
This has nothing to do with "green" propaganda and raining on your political masturbation parade, and everything to do with looking at ways to overcome the problems that die shrinkage has on causing waste power from static dissipation to prevent further technology advances, you fuck.
The summary is only using "off" in an informal sense. In an idealized textbook transistor model, when the transistor is "off" or in cutoff, it is off completely. But in reality, there is leakage, and so this "cutoff" region actually has some more interesting things going on, then a fucking tool like you apparently would understand. With large transistors in CMOS configurations, there is virtually no leakage and no static dissipation. As features have shrunk, the leakage has become a fully technological advancement problem. It isn't just about treehugging, but also the fact that if you get to a certain point where you have tons of transistors in a small space, if you can't remove the waste heat, you've got a major practical problem.
Get a clue, you useless fucktwit.