Slashdot Mirror
The Quest For the Ultimate Vacuum Tube (ieee.org)
An anonymous reader writes: IEEE Spectrum reports on progress in the development of vacuum tube technology, which remains surprisingly relevant in 2015. "In the six decades since vacuum tubes lost out to solid-state devices in computers, receivers, and power supplies, vacuum technology has continued to evolve and branch out into new terrain, sustaining a small but skilled corps of engineers and scientists around the world, as well as a multibillion-dollar industry. That's because the traveling-wave tube and other vacuum devices continue to serve one purpose extremely well: as powerful sources of microwave, millimeter-wave, and submillimeter-wave radiation. And now, ongoing research into a new and potentially revolutionary kind of traveling-wave tube—the ultracompact and ultraefficient cold-cathode TWT—looks poised to deliver the first practical device by the end of this decade."
No its not. Hole flow is the migration across molecules, of a free valence band. Why is it free? Because the electron that was there, moved. Ergo, all electric current is electron flow and every schematic drawn by every semiconductor engineer got the arrow backwards.
Nothing evolves faster than the word of god in the minds of men who think themselves divinely inspired.