How Vacuum Tubes, New Technology Might Save Moore's Law 183
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.
Magic Smoke (Score:5, Funny)
Pity Whitney Houston isn't still around (Score:4, Funny)
Stick her in front of a mike then tell her no more drugs and press record. That would have got you pretty close to that frequency range.
Re:Planck trumps Moore (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Planck trumps Moore (Score:2, Funny)
Gus Fring trumps Heisenberg.
Re:Why is helium the new answer? (Score:4, Funny)
Astrophysicists say no.
Re:Planck trumps Moore (Score:4, Funny)
Just ask Madoka [wikipedia.org].
Re:Why is helium the new answer? (Score:4, Funny)
All we need to do is figure out how to mine the Sun and we'll have all the helium we could ever want.