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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.
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.
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.
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.