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How Vacuum Tubes, New Technology Might Save Moore's Law
MojoKid (1002251) writes The transistor is one of the most profound innovations in all of human existence. First discovered in 1947, it has scaled like no advance in human history; we can pack billions of transistors into complicated processors smaller than your thumbnail. After decades of innovation, however, the transistor has faltered. Clock speeds stalled in 2005 and the 20nm process node is set to be more expensive than the 28nm node was for the first time ever. Now, researchers at NASA believe they may have discovered a way to kickstart transistors again — by using technology from the earliest days of computing: The vacuum tube. It turns out that when you shrink a Vacuum transistor to absolutely tiny dimensions, you can recover some of the benefits of a vacuum tube and dodge the negatives that characterized their usage. According to a report, vacuum transistors can draw electrons across the gate without needing a physical connection between them. Make the vacuum area small enough, and reduce the voltage sufficiently, and the field emission effect allows the transistor to fire electrons across the gap without containing enough energy to energize the helium inside the nominal "vacuum" transistor. According to researchers, they've managed to build a successful transistor operating at 460GHz — well into the so-called Terahertz Gap, which sits between microwaves and infrared energy.
So in the future, you'll know your electronics are broken when magic smoke is sucked into the chip?
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Stick her in front of a mike then tell her no more drugs and press record. That would have got you pretty close to that frequency range.
Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't. I'm uncertain...
Gus Fring trumps Heisenberg.
Astrophysicists say no.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Just ask Madoka.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
All we need to do is figure out how to mine the Sun and we'll have all the helium we could ever want.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.