Electromechanical Switches Could Reduce Future Computers' Cooling Needs

Earthquake Retrofit writes "Science Daily is reporting that researchers at Case Western Reserve University have taken the first step to building a computer capable of operating in extreme heat. Te-Hao Lee, Swarup Bhunia and Mehran Mehregany have made electromechanical switches — building blocks of circuits — that can take twice the heat that would render electronic transistors useless. 'The group used electron beam lithography and sulfur hexafluoride gas to etch the switches, just a few hundred nanometers in size, out of silicon carbide. The result is a switch that has no discernable leakage and no loss of power in testing at 500 degrees Celsius. A pair of switches were used to make an inverter, which was able to switch on and off 500,000 times per second, performing computation each cycle. The switches, however, began to break down after 2 billion cycles and in a manner the researchers do not yet fully understand. ... Whether they can reach the point of competing with faster transistors for office and home and even supercomputing, remains to be seen. The researchers point out that with the ability to handle much higher heat, the need for costly and space-consuming cooling systems would be eliminated.'"

Comments

Re:Steampunk

[msauve]

"an inverter which operates at 0.0005 Ghz is less interesting. Somehow I don't think we'll be seeing this replace electronics anytime soon."

As you alluded to, there are billions of microcontrollers out there running at less than 0.5 MHz. Heck, the good ol' Mostek 6502 ran at 1 MHz, and started an industry (KIM-1, Commodore PET, Apple ][, etc.) This is still in the research stage, but even at the current speeds, useful processors could be built (but apparently not last very long), especially since this would open new markets where traditional semiconductor gates won't function.

But, even short of a full processor, there could be uses for logical applications (gate arrays).