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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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