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posted by n1 on Tuesday June 24 2014, @08:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the everything-is-something dept.

Faster and smaller transistors are being developed and tested, and here's one of the more interesting new designs. It is effectively a vacuum tube/transistor hybrid. By utilizing modern manufacturing processes it is possible to make extremely small vacuum tubes that do not have any of the problems of older tubes, and also happen to be able to operate in the terahertz range.

Although we are still at an early stage with our research, we believe the recent improvements we've made to the vacuum-channel transistor could one day have a huge influence on the electronics industry, particularly for applications where speed is paramount. Our very first effort to fashion a prototype produced a device that could operate at 460 gigahertz -- roughly 10 times as fast as the best silicon transistor can manage. This makes the vacuum-channel transistor very promising for operating in what is sometimes known as the terahertz gap, the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum above microwaves and below infrared.

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @09:33AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @09:33AM (#59308)

    From the article:

    "That is, you don’t, in fact, need to maintain any sort of vacuum at all for what is nominally a miniaturized piece of “vacuum” electronics!"

    This nicely shows how ambiguous the term "vacuum" actually is. The device operates in vacuum because it is so small that the normal air won't interfere substantially with its operation. OTOH, even the best "vacuum" we can make on earth is nothing compared to the "vacuum" in space, which actually isn't a true vacuum either, but only a gas of extremely low density (IIRC, about one atom per cubic meter).

    If you have a "vacuum" or not (or rather, how much what you have is a vacuum) is entirely a question of scale: The higher your gas density, the larger your region of interest can be before it no longer can be considered filled with vacuum.

    In space, nobody can hear you cry, but not because there's no gas, but just because your voice box and the ears of anyone who might otherwise hear you are much too small for the density of the gas. Solar system-sized giants would probably have no trouble speaking with each other in space (although they'd probably speak that slowly that we'd not even notice that something is going on).

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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday June 25 2014, @01:34AM

    by kaszz (4211) on Wednesday June 25 2014, @01:34AM (#59646) Journal

    > The device operates in vacuum because it is so small that the normal air won't interfere substantially with its operation.

    Cool!

    I guess that some forces in the small range size essentially repel the air molecules? ie different forces at different scales. This would likely mean that browns motion is side stepped and that walls in gas containers has a very very thin layer of "vacuum". If so one should be able to exploit this container less super vacuum for many other things.