1: They demonstrated a ring oscillator, as stated in the article.
2: It sounds to me like this is a SiGe HBT although it is not specifically stated as such.
3: Because that is all that people on/. seem to know. The article talks about wireless communication and networking switches, the realm of bipolar transistors, not FETs. The problem is, the readers of/. seem to only know the CPU realm, so that is what they comment on.
This has been discussed for years, but not using poly, using selective epitaxial overgrowth and polish back to make SOI islands. It has been demostrated at the university level while I was still there. Groups had begun to investigate the advantages of having the third dimension available for circuits. I believe they quickly realized that the complexity was overwhelming with no CAD tools available to handle the concept.
NO, the US is attacking them. Someone committed a crime, not and act of war, and the US is responding by making war.
Ummmm, just in case you missed it Mr. Bin-laden declared war on the United States quite some time ago....yes, he considers this a war. You may not be able to realize this, but his version of a war is not our version of a war. He likes to blow up his soldiers while attacking civilian targets. We (basically the rest of the world) doesn't fight that way, we are now meeting his call for war with our means of war, if he doesn't like it, perhaps he should have choosen his words more carefully.
It is called not letting them win, we are attempting to go on with our lives. You know, every day thousands of people die needlessly. People are murdered, raped, robbed, tortured, etc. yet you went on with your life every day until yesterday, you monster!
At the blood bank in Paramus where I tried to give blood, there were five-hour lines, and the police turned us away.
As the day wears on and I numb to the shock of what has happened, I am again bothered by the reactionary nature of our society. Why does it take a major castastrophe to get people to do what I consider a part of our civic duty? The blood supply is always in dire straits, where are all these volunteer donors the rest of the time? Why does it take such a gross tragedy as this to bring people out to do what always needs to be done? I hope soon science will replace donated blood with a synthetic, but until we get to that point, why can't people realize how important regular donations are? Not only does it help your community, but it helps your health.
Yes we have special need as of today for increasing the safe blood supply, but let us all please try and remember this 1 month from now, 2 months from now, 2 years from now! There is ALWAYS a need blood, not just when a major crisis occurs. Hopefully science will find a replacement soon, but until then, if you are eligible donate regularly, even when there isn't an outcry.
You know, I don't enjoy seeing politics discussed on/., but this just makes me sick, on several levels. I am an American citizen, I am disgusted with what has happened today, I want someone strung up for this. But the primal feelings I have are disgusting to me.
It's easy for you to preach peace. Your country was not attacked. Your people were not killed. After the dust settles, we will find out who is responsible, and there's not going to be any talking going on.
Oh my goodness, wake up you haughty sheltered child! What the hell has our government been preaching about the middle east for the past 50 years?! We don't know yet that Palestinians attacked the US today, but I doubt many think any other group has the strength of belief to carry out what happened. Now look at what you said...and put those words into the mouths of the Palestinians who are literally kicked out of their homes to make space for Israeli settlements. They have been screaming for years about the atrocities occurring in the middle east, what did the US say...."sit down and talk, peace can be had." Now, the tables have turned, our home land has been attacked and you change your song so quickly.
I assure you, no US representives will be asking for peace. And it is their responsibility to their citizens in not doing so. Whether this was an internal terrorist or a foriegn terrorist, this should, and will, be dealt with on our terms.
I disagree, they will still ask for peace. What they will clammor for is Justice, as you should as well. The problem is I don't think we can all agree on what justice is. Do I think people should die for this? Only if there are still in existence people who helped coordinate this attack. I suspect there are, but I sure can't tell you for certain who they are. Any action before it is known who should be punished can not be called justice.
Now, take your self-centered, arrogant American attitude back inside you. I have the same feelings, but I know they are not worthy of airing on a public forum, and I know how stupid they continue to make America look.
I suspect the legal system is going to look at the two cases as seperate issues. They will view eBay as primarily a legal trading forum with only a small portion of the use being illegal, while Napster et al. are going to be viewed as primarily illegal programs with little if any legal usage. Time will tell.
And then I realized why you missed my point...you didn't read the article. They have proposed a mission of a whole 2 months duration! Yes, if they run longer missions as you have suggested, I would be quicker to agree that they can address the question of mammals settling other planets, but their 3rd point they want to investigate essentially is generations of mammals living in lower g environs. That is a vastly different situation than a quick 2 month hop and a single generation (I guess I am not sure what age mice mature, but I don't think they will get more than one generation in two months)!
We call it SCIENCE
I would call it shaky science at best (in terms of this question). As I said, I think it is something that is appropriate to explore, but don't come back and tell me that because of this we now know we can colonize Mars!
How is the ship being "manned" by mice? To me manned means operated, not just inhabited. Gotta love the English language! I am not sure what they hope to prove, how is a single generation going to prove that mammals can adapt to gravitational changes? I'm all for science, but shouldn't they reign in their expectations?
Simple, it costs them a lot more than $1 to install a second OS after a sale, wouldn't you agree? So let's say they charge the customer to cover their costs...now we are probably talking at least $20 (let's say they can get the install done in an hour, and they don't pay their people all that well). How many people are going to go through the bother of bringing the machine back in for this "unknown" alternative OS? I would guess that anyone who knows about BeOS is going to be able to install it themselves. The hardware manufacturer doesn't care what OS is installed on the machine, they just want to sell the machine. They have no incentive to make a sale take more time for themselves and their customers....
Tunneling effects won't be important until you reach barrier widths of around 50 Angstroms.
Ummm, have you seen what the gate oxide thicknesses are on these transistors? We are talking about 20-30 Angstroms. That would be the barrier width for the gate to channel, and yes, we do see tunnelling currents. There are many other issues to be dealt with, but yes, we do have tunnelling problems at the levels we are running today, that is why Fowler-Nordheim tunnelling models are now standard on device simulation packages. No, it isn't a bunch of crap, people just apply it to the wrong dimension.
No, tunneling is still a problem, especially in the gate oxides on MOS devices. However, they don't tell us their beam size for this system, only that it is half of the system it replaces (that was 12 years old I believe?). This leads me to think this system has a resolution on the order of 10 nm. Gate oxides under 3 nm are the ones that begin seeing larger tunneling currents (to become a concern).
This more perfect crystal structure exhibits reduced phonon-phonon and phonon-electron interactions which increases certain transport properties, such as thermal conductivity. It has been demonstrated in the laboratory that isotopically pure Si-28 has 60 per cent better room temperature thermal conductivity than natural silicon with its three isotopes.
Hang on, if they have reduced electron-phonon interactions, haven't they increased the mobility and reduced the heat generated? If they have also reduced phonon-phonon interactions, doesn't that hinder the transfer of heat away from the active devices? Am I the only one that think this story almost got it right, but just missed it?
Of course, Al never mentioned that the whole idea for "Amish Paradise" came from a morning radio show out of Indianapolis (Bob & Tom) that had a long standing joke band called The Electric Amish...one day they interviewed Weird Al and he heard one of the EA songs and commented how funny it was...about a month later, here is "Amish Paradise" (using many of the same bits from the EA song) and Al has yet to give any credit to The Bob & Tom Show producers. I guess he only asks for permission/gives credit for the music, not the content.
Well, definately C has taken place, the number of ballots rejected because of questions raised was 19,000, and last I heard, the race was as narrow as 799 votes. That's um, tight.
I wholeheartily disagree with your assumption that "C" has taken place. The criterion is that legal ballets have been rejected. However, the ballets rejected were double punched, and hence no longer considered legal ballets. Now, the person that double punched them was legally eligible to vote, but they invalidated their ballet when they double punched. This happens all the time, to the tune of over 15,000 ballets in 1996. Heck, when we had dorm elections in college, we usually had to throw out >1% of the ballets because they were not filled in correctly. Here, we are talking about much less than 0.5%, well within normal losses.
They should do a recount for democracy, not for the candidates. If that many people screwed up what seemed like a simple ballot, it just wasn't simple enough, and should be changed.
Then why didn't the democrats cry foul when in 1996 over 15,000 ballots got thrown out in Palm Beach county?? Do we need to re-run that election as well? Invalid ballots is a VERY common problem so do we need to change everything? Why is this now such a huge issue when it hasn't been a problem for 200+ years, at least not a problem the major parties have complained about.
The form was a user interface nightmare and was not tested before being put into use.
Pity this ballot was "tested." This ballot was reviewed and approved by both the Republican and Democratic parties for that county....notice how only 2 parties are allowed to approve ballots....make you wonder? Why is it that everyone seems to over look how the democratic party approved the ballet, but now that their candidate has gotten screwed, they are in an uproar.
I must say I am very saddened to see this whole thing happening. The most saddening part for me is that I honestly believe we will NEVER have any idea how the people of Florida really voted...I wonder how many other states have such poor election systems.
I think Motorola could learn a lot from the recent design trends of AMD and Intel, about ways of pushing the megahertz envelope
The main reason you don't see Motorola pushing the MHz is that they don't design that way. AMD and Intel design their processes (and by process I don't mean microprocessor, I mean the process by which they fabricate their MOSFETs) with a single goal, the highest clock rate. Motorola has a much different approach, they look more at robustness and efficiency. Which one is the proper way to design? Depends on what you want. Happily it is these design decisions that keep engineers employed;)
I understand very well how MOSFETs, JFETs, etc. work, but in the article, it sounded to me like the oscilation in conduction was not being induced by a third terminal, but instead by electrons hopping from the two electrodes. Did they actually have a third terminal to control the conduction and induce the oscillation? I do not think so, but I may be wrong.
They've used buckyballs to bridge a gap, allowing conduction. They've used electric fields to bounce the buckyballs up and down, switching the conduction.
Perhaps I misread their paper, but it sounded to me like they hadn't moved the balls with a third terminal, but merely moved it with electrons from the existing gold electrode, causing an oscillation as it bounced from the ball to the electrodes. Do you know if they have actually controlled the switching and I misread, or have they merely observed the bounce from the two electrodes?
I have to say, what is described in the article is a far cry from a transistor. All they have done to this point is fill disconnected gold contacts with conductive Carbon-60.
From the article:
"the authors stated in their Nature paper. "The transport measurements demonstrate that single-electron tunneling events can be used both to excite and probe the motion of a molecule.""
Have these guys ever heard of a tunneling electron microscope? Have they not seen the "IBM" written using individual atoms? This doesn't sound too new to me yet. It is possible I am missing something since the article doesn't seem to be written for engineers. Of course, once I got to this part:
"McEuen says this quantized nano-mechanical movement of the carbon-60 might serve as a logic gate, a means of storing information in the position of the molecule that would be more stable and much faster than the current technology."
I realized they hadn't made a transistor yet. All they have done is connected two electrodes with carbon-60, and since they might be able to isolate carbon-60 between two electrodes, they might be able to make something useful with it. Heck, they only have two electrodes right now, and last I check, transistors were at least 3 terminal devices. I don't mean to belittle their work, it is definitely a good road to follow, but it is also definitely a long road still. Let's not all get too excited too early.
Slashdot Mirror
1: They demonstrated a ring oscillator, as stated in the article.
/. seem to know. The article talks about wireless communication and networking switches, the realm of bipolar transistors, not FETs. The problem is, the readers of /. seem to only know the CPU realm, so that is what they comment on.
2: It sounds to me like this is a SiGe HBT although it is not specifically stated as such.
3: Because that is all that people on
Hope that helped.
This has been discussed for years, but not using poly, using selective epitaxial overgrowth and polish back to make SOI islands. It has been demostrated at the university level while I was still there. Groups had begun to investigate the advantages of having the third dimension available for circuits. I believe they quickly realized that the complexity was overwhelming with no CAD tools available to handle the concept.
NO, the US is attacking them. Someone committed a crime, not and act of war, and the US is responding by making war.
Ummmm, just in case you missed it Mr. Bin-laden declared war on the United States quite some time ago....yes, he considers this a war. You may not be able to realize this, but his version of a war is not our version of a war. He likes to blow up his soldiers while attacking civilian targets. We (basically the rest of the world) doesn't fight that way, we are now meeting his call for war with our means of war, if he doesn't like it, perhaps he should have choosen his words more carefully.
It is called not letting them win, we are attempting to go on with our lives. You know, every day thousands of people die needlessly. People are murdered, raped, robbed, tortured, etc. yet you went on with your life every day until yesterday, you monster!
At the blood bank in Paramus where I tried to give blood, there were five-hour lines, and the police turned us away.
As the day wears on and I numb to the shock of what has happened, I am again bothered by the reactionary nature of our society. Why does it take a major castastrophe to get people to do what I consider a part of our civic duty? The blood supply is always in dire straits, where are all these volunteer donors the rest of the time? Why does it take such a gross tragedy as this to bring people out to do what always needs to be done? I hope soon science will replace donated blood with a synthetic, but until we get to that point, why can't people realize how important regular donations are? Not only does it help your community, but it helps your health.
Yes we have special need as of today for increasing the safe blood supply, but let us all please try and remember this 1 month from now, 2 months from now, 2 years from now! There is ALWAYS a need blood, not just when a major crisis occurs. Hopefully science will find a replacement soon, but until then, if you are eligible donate regularly, even when there isn't an outcry.
You know, I don't enjoy seeing politics discussed on /., but this just makes me sick, on several levels. I am an American citizen, I am disgusted with what has happened today, I want someone strung up for this. But the primal feelings I have are disgusting to me.
It's easy for you to preach peace. Your country was not attacked. Your people were not killed. After the dust settles, we will find out who is responsible, and there's not going to be any talking going on.
Oh my goodness, wake up you haughty sheltered child! What the hell has our government been preaching about the middle east for the past 50 years?! We don't know yet that Palestinians attacked the US today, but I doubt many think any other group has the strength of belief to carry out what happened. Now look at what you said...and put those words into the mouths of the Palestinians who are literally kicked out of their homes to make space for Israeli settlements. They have been screaming for years about the atrocities occurring in the middle east, what did the US say...."sit down and talk, peace can be had." Now, the tables have turned, our home land has been attacked and you change your song so quickly.
I assure you, no US representives will be asking for peace. And it is their responsibility to their citizens in not doing so. Whether this was an internal terrorist or a foriegn terrorist, this should, and will, be dealt with on our terms.
I disagree, they will still ask for peace. What they will clammor for is Justice, as you should as well. The problem is I don't think we can all agree on what justice is. Do I think people should die for this? Only if there are still in existence people who helped coordinate this attack. I suspect there are, but I sure can't tell you for certain who they are. Any action before it is known who should be punished can not be called justice.
Now, take your self-centered, arrogant American attitude back inside you. I have the same feelings, but I know they are not worthy of airing on a public forum, and I know how stupid they continue to make America look.
I suspect the legal system is going to look at the two cases as seperate issues. They will view eBay as primarily a legal trading forum with only a small portion of the use being illegal, while Napster et al. are going to be viewed as primarily illegal programs with little if any legal usage. Time will tell.
mice live there for a few months/years
And then I realized why you missed my point...you didn't read the article. They have proposed a mission of a whole 2 months duration! Yes, if they run longer missions as you have suggested, I would be quicker to agree that they can address the question of mammals settling other planets, but their 3rd point they want to investigate essentially is generations of mammals living in lower g environs. That is a vastly different situation than a quick 2 month hop and a single generation (I guess I am not sure what age mice mature, but I don't think they will get more than one generation in two months)!
We call it SCIENCE
I would call it shaky science at best (in terms of this question). As I said, I think it is something that is appropriate to explore, but don't come back and tell me that because of this we now know we can colonize Mars!
spacecraft manned by mice
How is the ship being "manned" by mice? To me manned means operated, not just inhabited. Gotta love the English language! I am not sure what they hope to prove, how is a single generation going to prove that mammals can adapt to gravitational changes? I'm all for science, but shouldn't they reign in their expectations?
Simple, it costs them a lot more than $1 to install a second OS after a sale, wouldn't you agree? So let's say they charge the customer to cover their costs...now we are probably talking at least $20 (let's say they can get the install done in an hour, and they don't pay their people all that well). How many people are going to go through the bother of bringing the machine back in for this "unknown" alternative OS? I would guess that anyone who knows about BeOS is going to be able to install it themselves. The hardware manufacturer doesn't care what OS is installed on the machine, they just want to sell the machine. They have no incentive to make a sale take more time for themselves and their customers....
Perhaps if they had a fresher copy of the articles they could get a better test since then everyday readers like me can act like we do everyday?
Does anyone else remember this game or should I just check myself into a "home" (as my wife has threatened to do to me recently)?
Or are you just going to check yourself out of the asylum and join Wonko the Sane?
Tunneling effects won't be important until you reach barrier widths of around 50 Angstroms.
Ummm, have you seen what the gate oxide thicknesses are on these transistors? We are talking about 20-30 Angstroms. That would be the barrier width for the gate to channel, and yes, we do see tunnelling currents. There are many other issues to be dealt with, but yes, we do have tunnelling problems at the levels we are running today, that is why Fowler-Nordheim tunnelling models are now standard on device simulation packages. No, it isn't a bunch of crap, people just apply it to the wrong dimension.
No, tunneling is still a problem, especially in the gate oxides on MOS devices. However, they don't tell us their beam size for this system, only that it is half of the system it replaces (that was 12 years old I believe?). This leads me to think this system has a resolution on the order of 10 nm. Gate oxides under 3 nm are the ones that begin seeing larger tunneling currents (to become a concern).
From the linked article:
This more perfect crystal structure exhibits reduced phonon-phonon and phonon-electron interactions which increases certain transport properties, such as thermal conductivity. It has been demonstrated in the laboratory that isotopically pure Si-28 has 60 per cent better room temperature thermal conductivity than natural silicon with its three isotopes.
Hang on, if they have reduced electron-phonon interactions, haven't they increased the mobility and reduced the heat generated? If they have also reduced phonon-phonon interactions, doesn't that hinder the transfer of heat away from the active devices? Am I the only one that think this story almost got it right, but just missed it?
Of course, Al never mentioned that the whole idea for "Amish Paradise" came from a morning radio show out of Indianapolis (Bob & Tom) that had a long standing joke band called The Electric Amish...one day they interviewed Weird Al and he heard one of the EA songs and commented how funny it was...about a month later, here is "Amish Paradise" (using many of the same bits from the EA song) and Al has yet to give any credit to The Bob & Tom Show producers. I guess he only asks for permission/gives credit for the music, not the content.
Anyone who buys on the bleeding edge should have their heads examined.
Ahhh, but we must be thankful for those that do buy the bleeding edge...they subsidize our second stringers afterall!
Well, definately C has taken place, the number of ballots rejected because of questions raised was 19,000, and last I heard, the race was as narrow as 799 votes. That's um, tight.
I wholeheartily disagree with your assumption that "C" has taken place. The criterion is that legal ballets have been rejected. However, the ballets rejected were double punched, and hence no longer considered legal ballets. Now, the person that double punched them was legally eligible to vote, but they invalidated their ballet when they double punched. This happens all the time, to the tune of over 15,000 ballets in 1996. Heck, when we had dorm elections in college, we usually had to throw out >1% of the ballets because they were not filled in correctly. Here, we are talking about much less than 0.5%, well within normal losses.
They should do a recount for democracy, not for the candidates. If that many people screwed up what seemed like a simple ballot, it just wasn't simple enough, and should be changed.
Then why didn't the democrats cry foul when in 1996 over 15,000 ballots got thrown out in Palm Beach county?? Do we need to re-run that election as well? Invalid ballots is a VERY common problem so do we need to change everything? Why is this now such a huge issue when it hasn't been a problem for 200+ years, at least not a problem the major parties have complained about.
The form was a user interface nightmare and was not tested before being put into use.
Pity this ballot was "tested." This ballot was reviewed and approved by both the Republican and Democratic parties for that county....notice how only 2 parties are allowed to approve ballots....make you wonder? Why is it that everyone seems to over look how the democratic party approved the ballet, but now that their candidate has gotten screwed, they are in an uproar.
I must say I am very saddened to see this whole thing happening. The most saddening part for me is that I honestly believe we will NEVER have any idea how the people of Florida really voted...I wonder how many other states have such poor election systems.
I think Motorola could learn a lot from the recent design trends of AMD and Intel, about ways of pushing the megahertz envelope
;)
The main reason you don't see Motorola pushing the MHz is that they don't design that way. AMD and Intel design their processes (and by process I don't mean microprocessor, I mean the process by which they fabricate their MOSFETs) with a single goal, the highest clock rate. Motorola has a much different approach, they look more at robustness and efficiency. Which one is the proper way to design? Depends on what you want. Happily it is these design decisions that keep engineers employed
I understand very well how MOSFETs, JFETs, etc. work, but in the article, it sounded to me like the oscilation in conduction was not being induced by a third terminal, but instead by electrons hopping from the two electrodes. Did they actually have a third terminal to control the conduction and induce the oscillation? I do not think so, but I may be wrong.
They've used buckyballs to bridge a gap, allowing conduction. They've used electric fields to bounce the buckyballs up and down, switching the conduction.
Perhaps I misread their paper, but it sounded to me like they hadn't moved the balls with a third terminal, but merely moved it with electrons from the existing gold electrode, causing an oscillation as it bounced from the ball to the electrodes. Do you know if they have actually controlled the switching and I misread, or have they merely observed the bounce from the two electrodes?
I have to say, what is described in the article is a far cry from a transistor. All they have done to this point is fill disconnected gold contacts with conductive Carbon-60.
From the article:
"the authors stated in their Nature paper. "The transport measurements demonstrate that single-electron tunneling events can be used both to excite and probe the motion of a molecule.""
Have these guys ever heard of a tunneling electron microscope? Have they not seen the "IBM" written using individual atoms? This doesn't sound too new to me yet. It is possible I am missing something since the article doesn't seem to be written for engineers. Of course, once I got to this part:
"McEuen says this quantized nano-mechanical movement of the carbon-60 might serve as a logic gate, a means of storing information in the position of the molecule that would be more stable and much faster than the current technology."
I realized they hadn't made a transistor yet. All they have done is connected two electrodes with carbon-60, and since they might be able to isolate carbon-60 between two electrodes, they might be able to make something useful with it. Heck, they only have two electrodes right now, and last I check, transistors were at least 3 terminal devices. I don't mean to belittle their work, it is definitely a good road to follow, but it is also definitely a long road still. Let's not all get too excited too early.