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Return of the Vacuum Tube
sciencehabit writes "Peer inside an antique radio and you'll find what look like small light bulbs. They're actually vacuum tubes — the predecessors of the silicon transistor. Vacuum tubes went the way of the dinosaurs in the 1960s, but researchers have now brought them back to life, creating a nano-sized version that's faster and hardier than the transistor (abstract). It's even able to survive the harsh radiation of outer space."
...to the phrase "a series of tubes."
Now I can have a tube amp in my mp3 player.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
How will these affect my guitar tone?
These are still widely used in some of the best amps out there.
Almost every TV broadcast transmitter and most FM radio broadcast transmitters still use vacuum tubes for the high power output stages. Every microwave oven uses a vacuum tube to produce the microwaves. Most radar transmitters use vacuum tubes for the output stages, and often for signal generation too. The fact is that semiconductors have simply not been able to catch up to vacuum tubes for high power applications at UHF frequencies and above. 1960's technology still reigns supreme.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
aren't they just called "tubes"?
The technology could therefore be used at airports to safely scan for illicit drugs, for instance.
Why do people aim so low? I would love a terrahertz processor... war on drugs? what a waste.
Sorry, making the mandatory remark here. :-)
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
"Peer inside an antique radio and you'll find what look like small light bulbs. They're actually vacuum tubes — the predecessors of the silicon transistor. Vacuum tubes went the way of the dinosaurs in the 1960s,
Umm, what? Is that needed? Half of the summary is full of information nerds already know. Dumbing down of /. stories again? Is this part of the broader plan to make this site more appealing to PHBs and business intelligence analysts? :( /sorry bad day here
low power, high frequency, rugged, ... I say, these things might be useful
Whats old gets new again, whats new gets old. Keep seeing all these whippersnappers nowadays wearing the same clothes I wore years ago. Get off my lawn!!
They're actually vacuum tubes
I hardly think that people on a techie site (either this one or the one with TFA) have to be told what tubes are. It hasn't been THAT long since tube testers were around in drug stores, and even if you're too young to remember that, you at least have SEEN devices with tubes and know what the hell they're for.
Umm... right? Right?
And they are used in some of the best old-school reel-to-reel recorders. I don't know if they are making new components with tubes, but older tube pre-amps for Ampex and Scully tape recorders are prized by some audiophiles for their "warm" sound. They are also great for creating distortion...over-driving tube pre-amps creates some nice distortion effects which digital components would just clip.
But (and I'm speaking as someone who has been out of radio and audio for many years...I own a hardware store), from what I've seen and heard there are some pretty awesome digital programs that can duplicate nearly any pre-amp ever made. Based on what my daughter can do with her Mac (Protools, FInale, etc) I am pretty impressed at the sounds that can be processed even in a home environment with no need for tubes.
On the other hand, my tube pre-amps do keep the basement warm. :)
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
RCA developed a thermionic integrated circuit in the late 50s. An entire electronic device with dozens of "tubes" inside a single glass envelope.
Vacuum tubes did not go the way of the dinosaur in the 1960's. The 60's were just the beginning of the end. You could still buy vacuum tubes in the late 70's and early 80's. I have distinct memories of the tube tester kiosk (lots and lots of sockets) at our local K-Mart in Arlington, TX.
The failure mode was almost always the heater element burning out. So you'd just look for the one that didn't glow, pull it out, and take it to the store and buy a new one, just like getting a replacement oil filter for the car.
Vacuum tubes have always been radiation-hardened due to their large size and high voltages; typical supply voltage is 300 V.
Also, I call bullshit on the speed of electrons being a factor. It's the speed of the electromagnetic wave that matters, and light travels at light speed (which is around 2*10^8 m/s in copper).
And seriously, NASA and the military jumping on this? With what money? Both have switched to commercial off-the-shelf components for a lot of their work, and there isn't the budget to make custom chips like the old days. There's not enough volume there to get the kind of low prices from mass production you get for consumer gear, so this would only lead to more stories of "NASA's wasting taxpayer money buying $50000 computers that are less powerful than your desktop."
Ranting aside, the most amusing thing about this technology? It's what they used in the Lensman series.
It mentions that the scale of these things is 150nm, which sounds pretty large compared to modern cpu features. Still, it's a very interesting development.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
I regularly travel for business to east asia, and over there you can just walk to an electronic store and buy a radio with vacuum tubes. and you can also buy brand new replacements in the cheap. While in Russia I bought a tube russian amp head for a friend. And my friend swears it sounds better than a marshall amp head.
Vaccum tubes left in the sixties? Only to idiots who weren't paying attention.
Lets get this over with... Fuck Off
And is still used there.
There is 1) no vacuum and 2) there is no "tube." While there is an electron emitter, this device should be called a MOSFET.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Learn how to make them yourself:
http://dangerousprototypes.com/2012/05/03/homebrew-electronic-tubes
I wanted to build a HTPC around this mobo back in the day:http://www.retrothing.com/2007/07/vacuum-tube-pc-.html, but AOpen didn't continue it for very long. Maybe now someone will bring it back.
The penguin made me do it.
From a radiation engineering point of view, outer space is not the most stringent environment. It is actually significantly more forgiving than a lot of useful earth orbits or the radiation belts of the gas giants (but of course, you can hardly replace a failed transistor in space...).
These "vacum tube like" diamond field emission devices have shown radiation tolerance from 10 to 100 Mrad (1 MGy in SI units), so we are more talking about the levels required for operation in nuclear reactors or close to the beam of particle accelerators.
Vacuum tubes? NOTHING to see here; move along.
The article makes it seem like tubes have gone the way of the dinosaur. While they may have disappeared from consumer electronics, they are quite well in the world of hi-fi audio, as well as electric guitar amplification due to their dynamics, distortion, and harmonic characteristics compared to transistors.
Just walk into a Guitar Center and any of the amps worth their salt there will be full of tubes in the preamp and poweramp. Heck, there are $2000+, digital processors designed to specifically mimick the distortion characteristics of vacuum tube circuits. While tubes are a bad idea compared to transistors for modern electronics, when it comes to audio there are still clear advantages.
Hey, it's ok cffrost. Just calm down.
We all know dinosaurs still exist.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
In university I heard such "news" from my lecturer. That was more than 10 years ago.
Not to mention they'd possibly be immune to the effects of electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear explosion.
"Tales of the Flying Mountains" by Poul Anderson
It's a collection of short stories about the "Asteriod Republic" wrapped in a frame of the first interstellar flight. One of the stories features a military vessel whose electronics were built with "TEMMs" - Thermionic Emission Micro-Miniaturized - featured for its radiation hardness.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The article is painful in some aspects
Electrons move more slowly in a solid than in a vacuum, which means transistors are generally slower than vacuum tubes; as a result, computing isn't as quick as it could be.
I'm flabbergasted.
Meyyappan, who co-developed the "nano vacuum tube," says it is created by etching a tiny cavity in phosphorous-doped silicon. The cavity is bordered by three electrodes: a source, a gate, and a drain. The source and drain are separated by just 150 nanometers, while the gate sits on top. Electrons are emitted from the source thanks to a voltage applied across it and the drain, while the gate controls the electron flow across the cavity
This is really a vacuum tube if you add a high dose of immagination. Really
The separation of the source and drain is so small that the electrons stand very little chance of colliding with atoms in the air
Makes me wonder if tunneling plays a part here
how long until
"light" is another term for "electromagnetic radiation"
Although one could quibble about whether or not a EM radiation travels in a copper wire, and technically the speed of progagation of the signal in a copper wire is roughly 0.96c while in a coax cable it's more like 0.66c.
Really? This is pitiful.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
When Viktor Belenko defected to Japan with a MiG-25 fighter jet in 1976 (state of the art Russian aircraft back then, meant to counter our F-15) it was discovered that most of the electronics onboard the aircraft were built with micro-miniature vacuum tubes! The reason being that the fighter jet was designed for presumably nuclear war situations, and the Russians wanted to ensure that EMPs from nuclear explosions would not permanently damage the electronics, so the aircraft could still fly and fight even after exposure to any nearby nuclear explosions that were still distant enough to not physically destroy the aircraft.
Cutting the summary writer some slack, ignoring audiophile amps, ignoring guitar amps, ignoring microwave ovens, ignoring broadcast equipment, and even ignoring cathode ray tubes (which still outnumbered flat panel sales through 2004), consumer television sets didn't go "solid state" until 1975 (I remember it being a big deal to have the "solid state" badge on the front of a new-fangled TV because it meant you didn't have to wait (as long) for it to warm up).
No "nanotube" comments?
Three valve/tube loaded guitar and bass amps means I've got a dozen or so "Dinosaurs" living in my lounge room. Not like they are relics either two of the amps are post 2000 designed and built units (Blackstars).
When I was a young kid, my mother would fix the TV by pulling out all of the TV tubes, wrapping them in news pages, and then carrying them all down-town to a big drug store which had a coin-operated tube-tester machine. She'd plug them into the matching slots one by one and see which ones were good and which were sour. I couldn't help her because I was too short.
Then she'd go to the back of the store to find matches for the sour tubes based on the codes printed on the tube slots. (Often the label was worn/cooked off the tube itself such that the slot labels on the tester were the only way to tell.)
I'd generally consider her a "technophobe", but she did it in a very routine fashion as if she'd done it dozens of times before. People just got used to tubes back then.
At least TV's were partly repairable. Now the repair costs are often more than a new TV. Oh, and Get off my lawn!
Table-ized A.I.
I love the way the big snag is barely mentioned near the end of the article. They need about 10V to power up. That makes them rather unsuitable for Terahertz computing.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Hmm now where have I heard that before, Oh I remember,,,
Field Effect Transistor which, if I remember correctly is also etched from silicon.
Hmm I wonder if this is all that new?
The article doesn't mention if heat is required to make this device work. Vacuum tubes needed heaters to allow electron flow to happen and very high voltages, well when I say high I mean around 60-90v.
Vacuum tubes aren't that unusual. The US Military has been using them for decades for Night Vision equipment and the best NV equipment is still based on vacuum tube technology. This is what Image Intensifiers are, which comprise more than 90% of new NV equipment.
Less commonly ( and more historically ) the Image Intensifier is a particular type of tube known as a photodiode, but more modern tubes incorporate a lot more technology including electron multipliers ( microchannel plates ) within the tube itself.
But it's still all 100% vacuum tube technology and hasn't changed much over the past century.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
Hey, it's ok cffrost. Just calm down.
We all know dinosaurs still exist.
And responsible owners don't feed them crack cocaine.
And the funny thing that it was even not that "secret" of a technology (application was, of course!), I remember reading about "new life of a vacuum tube" in Soviet magazine for technically-inclined kids ("Yunyi Technic") sometime in my early teens, late 70s - early 80s -- I definitely remember reading about thin-film integrated vacuum tubes technology, and, I think, about it's rad-hardness (not using that word, of course, or better half of the reason why it is important ;-) ).
Paul B.
Thanks for modding me down jackass. You could have INFORMED me of that fact without punishing me with a -1 whip. (And if it wasn't you, then I direct my comment to the other fucker that did it.)
You can't post and moderate in the same article. Posting removes all your moderations in that article.
One tube isn't enough to do both channels of audio. You'd need at least two and more assuming you weren't doing a single ended amp. As such all it was doing was maybe supplying power. So it wouldn't be doing anything useful. It was just a marketing gimmick to get wanna be audio heads to say "Oh this board is cool" and buy it.
A good modern transistor amp can do precisely what a good amp should: Disappear. They can have distortion low enough, noise low enough, be linear enough, and so on that they don't introduce any audible artifacts of their own. You can swap well built ones around and hear no difference.
That's what you want out of a good reproduction amp, just a wire with gain effectively. It should introduce no changes of its own. Of course you can't have one that is flawless and does NO changes but you can have one that the changes are so low you can't hear them.
Don't have to break the bank for it either. You don't have to but some $5000 monstrosity, a couple hundred dollars and the right design gets a transistor amp that just vanishes.
Now if there's a reason to want the distortion, then maybe you want a tube amp. Electric guitar can be such a case. The signature sound they have doesn't come from the guitars themselves, they sound very flat and boring plugged right in to a mixer. It is the speaker and amp that give them their sound. You take tubes and drive them in to the non-linear range on purpose.
Fair enough, but not the goal of reproduction. Also these days, it is getting cheaper just to DSP things. We have a rather good idea of how various things create the sound that they do and we have powerful and cheap DSPs that can throw math at the audio signal and make the same thing happen. Often the way to go, particularly since you get flexibility.
CLIPBOARD FAIL! Humiliation.
I'm not reading one more word from a glib duffus prime who still thinks the dinosaurs went the way of the dinosaurs.
Now they'll be buying up tube radios and whatnot because of their resiliency against EMPs from HAARP or other such crazy things.
If you haven't seen this, turn in your geek card now: Mullard tube factory.
The claim of 0.8 THz being 10X faster than existing technology is wrong. Here's a 2006 report of an Indium phosphide device. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/12/061212091344.htm. Also, tubes can't make the equivalent of P-channel or PNP devices, greatly reducing their utility in logic circuits. Finally, the 10V switching threshold severely limits the amount of future shrinking possible.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Yeah, I see flocks of them every day
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
...is that you can make your own.
Both videos are about 8 minutes long, with a lovely soundtrack, and it goes through the entire process. From raw metal to finished tube.
[End Of Line]
i have dinosaurs in my guitar amp
I love how the summary had to explain on a site full of nerds what the fuck a vacuum tube is... They didn't die off at the beginning of the transistor age, by the way, they just became niche.
I think you have your distortion confused. Even distortion sounds terrible. Think of a speaker with a failing voice coil connection. Tubes are better at supressing even order distortion a little but it is usually the push-pull design that tubes use that cancels even harmonics. Transistor can do this too. I think much of the tube advantage comes from how the power supply varies with the loudness, and the ability to withstand serious overload for the better part of a minute vs a fraction of a millisecond. It tends to align accuracy with the dynamic range of human hearing.
http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
One of the computers in this story was composed of microscopic vacuum tubes. Will it be possible to create a massive analogue computer like that instead of using digital chips?
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
My guitar amp from Fender uses vaccum tubes. Most high-end amplifiers for you home stereo use vaccum tubes. Is this really news?
I don't know if this is a urban legend or not, but the story says that when some Russian pilots deserted with their airplanes, this was the first time when US scientists could look into a MIG. They saw that the electronics was made thanks to tubes. They first thought it was the sign of an obsolete technology but then learned that it was part of their hardening to be able to fly even in a radioactive atmosphere in case of nuclear war.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
You forgot one step:
3. Profit!!
So the word "nanotubes" now has new meaning.
I guess Mork from Ork was right, and there was a reason he was always saying that.
I myself am tired of hearing about nano vaporware that doesn't materialize into actual product.
Nano! Nano!
Who cares about military and space applications. Are we finally going to get a real tube sound without the hassle of tubes for our guitar amps?
and you'll find a tiny little dead hamster in a rusted wheel!!
who writes this crap???
That radar caused tremendous interference on the ham short wave bands. It got the name "the Russian Woodpecker" since that is what the interference sounded like, a flock of angry woodpeckers.
Indeed. After all, the devil didn't make vintage amplifiers to convince us that solid state ones "evolved" from tube ones...
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I once bought a control unit from a Nike Hercules rocket. Very heavy and loaded with modules that used pencil tubes, or superminiature tubes, mechanical gyroscopes and a 5Ghz magnetron tube coupled to a waveguide with mechanical wobbler disc, driven by a DC motor.. As it was (obvisously) never used, but to heat up, as evidenced by thermally darkened area's on the pcb's, I used these parts, and as much of the original resistors and (leaky) capacitors as possible, to build a very mean guitar amp.
But anyway, it still plays today.
Could this be useful in Fukushima? I dunno lol
The exact same thing was proposed in the DOD space community in the 1980s. They were called TICs or thermionic integrated circuits though strictly the were actually field emission integrated circuits. It never got anywhere because you can trivially attain megarad total dose and SEU resistance with standard bulk CMOS processes (read: dirt cheap with existing supply chains) with nothing more than revised layout design rule. This has been know since the mid 1980s.
If someone at NASA is claiming invention of this it's plagiarism.
Don't Russian Fighter Jets use vacuum tubes so they won't fall out of the sky if a bomb does go off?
Wasn't the woodpecker a stationary radar? I thought the other anonymous coward was talking about the Mig's on-board radar.
Its ability to outrun opponents has proven to be valuable in battle.