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https://www.fau.eu/2017/09/25/news/research/the-fastest-light-driven-current-source/
Controlling electronic current is essential to modern electronics, as data and signals are transferred by streams of electrons which are controlled at high speed. Demands on transmission speeds are also increasing as technology develops. Scientists from the Chair of Laser Physics and the Chair of Applied Physics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have succeeded in switching on a current with a desired direction in graphene using a single laser pulse within a femtosecond – a femtosecond corresponds to the millionth part of a billionth of a second. This is more than a thousand times faster compared to the most efficient transistors today.
[...] For their experiments, the scientists fired extremely short laser pulses with specially engineered waveforms onto graphene. When these light waves hit the graphene, the electrons inside were hurled in one direction, like a whiplash. 'Under intense optical fields, a current was generated within a fraction of an optical cycle – a half femtosecond. It was surprising that despite these enormous forces, quantum mechanics still plays a key role,' explains Dr. Takuya Higuchi from the Chair of Laser Physics, the first author of the publication.
Light-field-driven currents in graphene (DOI: 10.1038/nature23900) (DX)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 27 2017, @05:15PM (1 child)
Removing the need for a monotonic clock pulse could very well be one of the benefits of this technology. While clockless traditional CPU designs do exist, they haven't gotten transistor switching time down to the half femtosecond like is being described here. Combine this with RISC architectures that reduce the number of transistors needed to being with and we really start to see some real potential with this kind of technology.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday September 28 2017, @07:38AM
But removing the need for a monotonic clock pulse could also be done WITHOUT this technology.
Even at traditional transistor speed, they can't manage to match clocked chips.
It may also mean a complete change of architecture and many even programming paradigm (i.e. everything suddenly becomes asynchronous).
But it doesn't need THz transistors to get there.