SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
With the development of carbon nanotubes and graphene, scientists were given an entirely new collection of materials to work with: sheets and tubes that could be consistently made with thicknesses roughly those of individual atoms. These materials hold the promise of building electronic devices with dimensions smaller than is currently possible through any other process and with properties that can be tuned by using different starting materials.
So far, most of the attention has gone to re-creating new versions of familiar devices. But a new paper by a group of researchers in Shanghai looks into what can be done if you're not constrained by the sorts of devices we currently make in silicon. The result is a device that can perform basic logic in half the transistors silicon needs, can be switched between different logical operations using light, and can store the output of the operation in the device itself.
Small footprint transistor architecture for photoswitching logic and in situ memory (DOI: 10.1038/s41565-019-0462-6) (DX)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @03:28PM
think of transistors simplistically as voltage controlled variable resistors. in a MOSFET, applying voltage to the gate (different FET styles have different forward bias requirements) changes the conductivity of the main channel (source to drain). In digital logic, the main channel is driven to either saturation (full on - minimum resistance) or cutoff (full off - maximum resistance).