Slashdot Mirror
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.
Unless you want to redesign the Universe.
Intel is set to ship 14nm before end of year. Certainly not at a loss :-)
Human anus
First HDDs now CPUs?
http://worldwide.espacenet.com...
As usual this topic gets its history wrong, the first transistor was in the 1920s
As a 450GHz computing element, this is a long way off. But it might lead to better terahertz radar. Right now, operating in the terahertz range is painfully difficult. It's a strange region where both electronics and optics work, but not easily. This may be a more effective way to work in that range.
but that with increasing clock speed the size of your chip is limited (as electricity can only travel that far in a given amount of time) -> can't keep your chip synchronized -> need to think of new ways how to sync everything / if there are alternatives.
I work in a lab where we make radio receivers that work at frequencies around 460 GHz. As it is, we have to use a mixer diode to convert to a lower frequency (10 GHz) before amplifying the signal. This technology would be well suited to this application, provided that the noise is low enough. We already cool the mixer to 4K in a vacuum chamber.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Thanks for article.I read like this in Haber
Is this one of those revolutionary new technologies that we hear of once every week that is supposed to change everything ever but never hear from it again? Because I'm really sick of getting my hopes up.
Looking forward to Batman v. Superman : Dawn of Justice though
Interestingly enough, these micro/nano vaccuum tubes do not actually need to be enclosed inside a vaccuum.
The 'vacuum tube' is tiny in comparison to the distance between air molecules in open air.
The fad is ending.
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.
If you calculate Moore's law from 2000 to 2014 you find it to have been held back and not honored. Manufactures basically capped consumer level processors at 1 billion and quad cores and refused to push it hardly any further except in military technology. In 2000 the Athlon Thunderbird had 34 million transistors and after applying Moore's law in 2014 our desktop rigs should have at least 30 billion. Instead they have 1 billion.
Also the first 1 billion transistor CPU was an Intel Itanium.. Built in 2006 on 90nm year 2002 fab technology showing you what could have been done in 2002 but took till 2006 due to laziness and bad product designs being used for the consumer level market.
I think the military plays a role in all this because theoretically they would be designing transistor based applications without these limitations perhaps including single CPUs 512 times faster than the consumer level counterparts. Making me think the old adage about the military being up to 30 years ahead of the civilian technology is true. It is certainly true when their quantum level remote brain reading / manipulation technology gets looked at; nothing compares or even does a part of it in the consumer market but it does exist. Why would the military hold the technology back or deliberately cripple the consumer level stuff? Engineering profits is one factor of the manufactures but another issue is to keep weapons out of the civilian populations hands, and also to give the exclusive upper hand to the military. Previously DOD would claim even the PS2 was a weapon and this is the logic I apply to all computer technology as either weapons can be designed faster or new electronic weapons automated and engineered using the held back technologies .. Many technologies are legit being held back and have been held back for decades as a result of these policies.
More details at http://www.obamasweapon.com/
This past week had seen some very interesting topics bounce up (fermi down?) to the top. Makes me proud to be a part of the 'forefront' of technology of our time, humanites.
/stoner
Its what you can do with them thats interesting and thats only going to get more fascinating as the years go by.
A computer without a program is just a plastic brick.
I do think you should take about three weeks completely off the internets. Your brain is emitting nonsense.
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.
Should this type of component be known as an "valvistor"?
"It was a nice feeling to have a Microvac of your own and Jerrodd was glad he was part of his generation and no other. In his father's youth, the only computers had been tremendous machines taking up a hundred square miles of land. There was only one to a planet. Planetary ACs they were called. They had been growing in size steadily for a thousand years and then, all at once, came refinement. In place of transistors had come molecular valves so that even the largest Planetary AC could be put into a space only half the volume of a spaceship."
- Issac Asimov, The Last Question, 1956.
Today, Moore's law is an interconnect problem. The switching elements are pretty unimportant for it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This looks like the ideal technology for electronics that have to work in extremes of temperatures or high radiation environments. I'm surprised the military and aerospace industries aren't jumping all over this.
My rights don't need management.
Natural things and phenomena are "discovered". Transistors were invented after a lot of hard work. By engineers.
A law needs to stand on it's own with out the need for external help, if Moores law break then it's not a law.
what in the actual fuck did I just read?
Discovery implies revealing something that always existed that we simply did not have awareness of.
Indeed, I can say with certainty that transistors did not exist prior to their INVENTION (not discovery).
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.
From what I understand, drugs or not, her voice was already well past its peak (at best) if not totally f****d by the time she died anyway. Some of that was possibly due to age, most of it was probably smoking crack all day for years on end.
Given that technical excellence was her thing- because it sure as hell wasn't the ability to impart anything approaching soul or emotion into her singing- that's quite a big flaw.
Besides which, I thought it was Mariah Carey that had the ability to hit the most ludicrously high notes.
I'm still waiting for my memristor computer...
Julius Edgar Lilienfeld patented a FET in 1925. The FET is the type of transistor used in all modern CPUs.
...when will this result in a 100W Marshall head on a chip?
(Why yes, I am a guitar player! Thanks for asking.)
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
Where can I find a vacuum transistor tester. They took all of the tube testers out of the front of my local Radio Shack years ago, will they be replaced?
Have gnu, will travel.
Aren't there still going to be problems of scaling this thing? It seems like they are talking about something that is about an order of magnitude or more larger than transistors today, and that's going to limit the complexity of a circuit.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You sound like an Intel engineer back when the Pentium 4 CPU's NetBurst architecture was the next big thing. Yes, pipelining exists. Yes, branches stall it. Yes, the processor ends up forfeiting a lot of work (and a lot of power and heat) when it mispredicts a branch. There's a reason Intel decided to base the Core architecture on P6 (Pentium II/III family) rather than NetBurst.
You also run into difficulties when a following instruction needs to use the results of the precending one.
If a scheduler foresees a pipeline bubble due to latency of the ALU, and data forwarding is not enough to resolve it, the scheduler could feed the ALU a mix of instructions from two threads. This sort of simultaneous multithreading appears in Intel's Hyper-Threading Technology and AMD's "modules", and it's been around since the "barrel processor" architecture of the I/O processor in the CDC 6000 mainframe.
Sorry to say, it's too cohesive to be real. Better luck hooking the big kahuna next time, eh?
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... - Physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld filed a patent for a field-effect transistor (FET) in Canada in 1925, which was intended to be a solid-state replacement for the triode.[1][2] Lilienfeld also filed identical patents in the United States in 1926[3] and 1928.[4][5] However, Lilienfeld did not publish any research articles about his devices nor did his patents cite any specific examples of a working prototype. Because the production of high-quality semiconductor materials was still decades away, Lilienfeld's solid-state amplifier ideas would not have found practical use in the 1920s and 1930s, even if such a device had been built.[6] In 1934, German inventor Oskar Heil patented a similar device.[7] - The transistor was REINVENTED in 1947!!! - Following its development in 1947 by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, the transistor revolutionized the field of electronics
Actually it was invented about 20 years before that, by a little known inventor with the name of Thomas Henry Morey. The solid state valve (build with Germanium), as it was known, and patented by the way, was invented connection with Dr. Morey's energy device that was pulling power from the charged dielectric around us ( a fancy name for the air close to the earth surface ).
Moore's law states that the number of transistors that can fit into a given area will double every 2 years. It states nothing of the computational power of said transistors.
Even if we were talking about Moore's law, why is this a good thing? Holding back technology just to satisfy this imaginary barrier, doesn't make any sense. It's the equivalent of saying lets not release the best we have because we think we can make more money if we cripple it and release it slowly over several years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Perl Programmer for hire