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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.
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.
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.
Asynchronous designs are faster (~3x) and consume less energy (~2x) but need an overhaul of the production process who is deemed too costly. Perhaps this technology could make it interesting again. (Source)
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.
Not the production process so much as the design process. It'd mean starting over from scratch with a whole new architecture, redoing decades of work in hardware and software.
"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.
Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't. I'm uncertain...
Intel has an insanely high Gross Profit Margin of 75%. That is the opposite of selling at a loss.
http://www.thestreet.com/story...
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.