Engineers at Purdue University and GlobalFoundries have gotten today's most advanced transistors to vibrate at frequencies that could make 5G phones and other gadgets smaller and more energy efficient. The feat could also improve CPU clocks, make wearable radars, and one day form the basis of a new kind of computing. They presented their results today at the IEEE International Solid-States Circuits Conference, in San Francisco.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/devices/finfets-shimmy-to-5gs-frequencies
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FinFETs Shimmy to 5G's Frequencies
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(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday February 21 2018, @12:12AM (4 children)
Vibrate?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2018, @12:18AM
yeah at 32GHz but analog nonetheless, awesome tech according to the tfda
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday February 21 2018, @12:20AM (2 children)
"acoustically resonate" [...] "components tuned to physically vibrate at a particular frequency and produce a useable electronic signal"
Sounds like a vibrator to me.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21 2018, @12:22AM (1 child)
> Sounds like a vibrator to me.
If you can hear that, you are really good!
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday February 21 2018, @11:54AM
Nah, I just write SDR software. [fyngyrz.com] :)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by requerdanos on Wednesday February 21 2018, @12:24AM (3 children)
That might be an exciting statement, and it might just be nonsense, so I dug a little deeper.
New new kind of computing is that in which the processor has its own magic vibrating clock instead of a separate oscillator, propagating the clock signal throughout the chip audibly(?!) instead of using electrons and electricity, as we do today. This might result in what the article says is a power savings of something like a third, all-being-equal. Pretty cool. I hope they use it to make chips that are "ridiculously fast" and not just chips that are "more efficient".
The actual techno-speak from the article:
And I forgot to mention! Moore's law is now not considered to be dead like it was just recently, but a living force that makes finFET technology have more and more superpowers.
Who could have predicted that [soylentnews.org]?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday February 21 2018, @12:31AM
Amazingly, different people have different opinions about the matter.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday February 21 2018, @01:05AM (1 child)
So its a vibrating clock.
But where does the transistor bit come in?
There's no mention of transistors vibrating there in the wiki page. [wikipedia.org]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Informative) by requerdanos on Wednesday February 21 2018, @01:28AM
The transistor has fins, and their vibration keeps time. I suppose that must be analogous to a pendulum, albeit a really really really small fast one. I guess they're clocky transistors.
Here's a neat picture [anandtech.com] of a finFET transistor whose fins could be made to vibrate (wiggle, shimmy, what-have-you) with this new technology (picture appears on this page [maltiel-consulting.com] (scroll down to "The 3D Tri-Gate Transistor").
I suppose you could make a finFET something else and it could wiggle, too, now, but I gather the excitement comes from making the transistor subcomponents vibrate. It's frankly over my head.