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Future Phones May Use Vacuum Tube Chips As Silicon Hits Moore's Law Extremes (inverse.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A team of researchers want to replace transistors with vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes are nothing new, however the ones in development at Caltech's Nanofabrication Group are a million times smaller than the ones in use 100 years ago. "Computer technologies seem to work in cycles," Alan Huang, a former electrical engineer for Bell Laboratories, told the New York Times. "Some of the same algorithms that were developed for the last generation can sometimes be used for the next generation." Dr. Axel Scherer, head of the Nanofabrication Group, said to the New York Times on Sunday, "Ten years ago, silicon transistors could meet all our demands. In the next decade, that will no longer be true." He argues silicon transistors can only take us so far. Vacuum tubes, for comparison, use tiny metal tubes that can control the flow of electricity. They're especially intriguing to researchers as they can provide a better solution to silicon transistors as they can consume less power and take-up a much smaller footprint. The report mentions they have the potential to bring an end to Moore's Law, even if silicon transistors show no signs of disappearing. For example, Lockheed Martin published new cooling methods in March that could help cool chips with tiny drops of water. With that said, Boeing has invested in researching vacuum tube chips. They may appear in the aviation industry before 2020, but it's unlikely we'll see Caltech's research appear in smartphones anytime soon.
Hmmmmmmmm. Or should I say "hummmmmmmm..."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"but it's unlikely we'll see Caltech's research appear in smartphones anytime soon."
I am reading on a phone right now you insensitive clod!
love is just extroverted narcissism
No, they wouldn't be as resistant on average, because yes, the biggest factor is size.
That being said, EMP resistance gets 'complicated', and it's easier to stick a small chip inside a faraday cage than a room sized monster.
I don't read AC A human right
If it was censored, how would you be able to see it?
Call me a geek if you like, but I really enjoy watching this video of a guy hand-making triode valves (AKA vacuum tubes), it's somehow very therapeutic. Yep, only vaguely on topic, but what the hell, we're talking about vacuum tubes.
Oh no... it's the future.
Call me dumb if you want, but I design ASICs for a living. How am I supposed to design a chip with these devices. When I design in CMOS silicon, I have the choice of four different polysilicon well types (P, P+, N and N+). Do these devices require several voltage rails to provide bias, in the way that the dopant provides intrinsic bias in a FET?
I'm not old enough to have designed valve circuits, but from what I vaguely recall, you only get emission from cathodes, so with no hole mobility I don't understand quite how these things are supposed to provide complementary logic.
I've no doubt we can make ten or a hundred nano-vacuum tubes atom by atom. But compared to many billions of transistors? It looks like EUV litography @ 7nm will be ready by the end of the decade, but in the 2020s I suspect we'll hardly see any progress at all.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Don't tell me, steam will also make a comeback.
That's gonna be so cool: switch it on and you hear:
Chug......chug...chug, chug, chug as puffy white smoke billows out.
And then Microsoft will tell you, "640 gallons of water oughtta be enough for anyone!"
Table-ized A.I.
Stop relying on devices that track you constantly and are closed for your computing. Stop using phones as computers.
If apps for such a device had to be loaded from Fortran card decks that came by mail, I suppose there would be a lot less malware on phones.
Nope.
Just no. Nada. Not gonna happen.
And who at Slashdot took this seriously?
Bruce Perens.
I find that the results from numerical computations on today's transistor-based CPUs often have an undesirable "harshness".
Vacuum tube CPUs will hopefully yield richer, more mellow computational results.
Odd. It's Score:5, Offtopic for me. Figuring out why is left as an exercise for the reader.
Does anybody know how big they were 100 years ago? I have no idea. I'm guessing most people don't. Since when did "fraction of size of a vacuum tube from 1916" become a unit of length?
Seriously, how big are they? Assuming a vacuum tube in use in 1916 was 10cm in length, I'm coming up with 100nm, which is FREAKING HUGE compared to present day Si transistor sizes which are closer to 16nm IIRC.
This quote was amazingly stupid: "At this level, silicon starts to behave weirdly. It becomes more elastic, and starts to give out light. Silicon transistors also leak electrons at smaller sizes." It's not behaving "weirdly" this is purely a consequence of size. When things are small the ratio of surface to bulk is higher. When things are nanoscale there is almost no bulk left, so the properties begin to resemble surface properties more than bulk properties. Seriously, there's no mystery to it. I have a PhD in chemistry and have studied both nanomaterials and semiconductors. I've never seen such a stupid explanation of size-dependent properties as was offered in this article. I hope the Cal-Tech researchers didn't write that. Also, electrons don't "leak." That's just stupid. Current leaks. If electrons "leaked" you'd wind up with a charge that would oppose further leaking and the leak would stop itself. They phenomenon they are attempting to describe (and failing miserably) is leakage current. Leakage current happens when charge flows through an insulated path (i.e. the current going to the gate in a MOSFET). Was the concept too hard to explain simply while also being truthful? I think my explanation was fine, and it was just one sentence.
Anyway, I've seen some pretty bad writing before, but this was an entirely new level. There is nothing but speculation and horribly written incorrect statements about present day semiconductors. I would have dismissed this had they answered any remotely interesting question such as: What is the new advancement that enabled tiny vacuum tubes? How big are they? What are their electronic properties? How to they work? Why do their properties not change when miniaturized? Terrible story. The researchers at Cal-Tech should be ashamed if they had any part in this.
A vacuum tube is a macroscopic device. An electrode is heated, electrons shoot out and their trajectory is controlled by charged grids.
On microchip scales, it's all about quantum physics. Electrons are wave-like, they tend to teleport through obstacles, change size as they are heated or cooled down, really weird stuff. The math probably works but I wouldn't call these things "vacuum tubes" when the very notion of everything that makes up a vacuum tube is challenged at these scales.