Could modern, nanoscale vacuum tubes replace transistors?
Public Group active 2 years, 11 months agoOne of the topics we’ve covered many times at ExtremeTech is the difficulty of continuing to scale semiconductor technology, and the related problem of improving chip performance without increasing clock speed. While Intel and other manufacturers still search for long-term solutions to this problem, no known next-generation technology is likely to restart silicon scaling and for returning to traditional clock speed gains.
Researchers in the California Institute of Technology think could have a solution to this problem — 1 involves here we are at a very old technology to solve the problems of existing methods. Vacuum tubes, according to Dr. Axel Scherer, could key to improving transistor performance and lowering power consumption.
Chances are, when you think vacuum tubes, you think of old radios or possibly Aopen’s AX4B-533 “TubeAmp” system board. The systems that Dr. Scherer and his research team are working on are nothing like classic vacuum tubes — according to the team, the structures are roughly 1,000x smaller than a human blood cell, that make them 6–8nm. Trouble people with modern CPUs is that they suffer from significant numbers of electricity leakage — Scherer’s designs would use leakage current to flip states on purpose, thereby improving efficiency and overall performance.
One reason for this studies are that Scherer thinks the microprocessor teams scaling below 10nm will encounter problems. The properties of silicon apparently change at that point, becoming both elastic and emitting light. “It’s a different material, therefore it gives you this different behavior,” Scherer told the new York Moments.
Can tubes replace transistors?
Dr. Scherer isn’t doing this to reinvent the transistor or replace the silicon financial crisis. Boeing is funding his research due to the potential applications in space and aviation technologies, and silicon will obviously function as the gold standard for everyone for quite a while. It’s still interesting to consider the question: Could this kind of fundamentally different technology, shrunk to a microscopic scale, solve the problems of transistor scaling and performance?
Maybe — but there’s a involving problems to be solved between here and there. First, there’s the question of manufacturing — can we crank out tens of thousands of vacuum-based processors in a month? What does it cost to build these solutions, switch out manufacturing hardware, and build an ecosystem around these kinds of? Can they built quickly enough to maintain current production rates, therefore how will they integrate into existing product lines?
These might sound like boring questions over a technology’s fundamental promise, nevertheless the boring questions are what ultimately determine whether or not tech comes to market. Many of us talk about Intel not being able to build faster CPUs, it doesn’t mean silicon could be the fastest semiconductor ever. It means that Intel can’t locate a method of building faster chips that’s cost-effective, scaleable, and likely to last multiple product versions.
Miniature vacuum tubes could evolve appropriate major driver of PC performance, especially when they can be manufactured at scale, nevertheless the cost and manufacturing challenges are an enormous roadblock to the different technology establishing itself as a silicon competitor. Neither carbon nanotubes nor graphene have done so, despite huge initial hype. There’s something satisfying in the idea that a century-old technology could be adapted and improved relevant that it boosts modern computing, but it’s going to take for the better of expensive work to prove it can do as.
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