Could modern, nanoscale vacuum tubes replace transistors?
Public Group active 2 years, 11 months agoOne of the several topics we’ve covered many times at ExtremeTech is the actual of continuing to scale semiconductor technology, and the related problem of improving chip performance without increasing clock speed. While Intel and other manufacturers continue to search for long-term in order to this problem, no known next-generation technology is expected to restart silicon scaling as well as for a return to traditional clock speed gains.
Researchers in the California Institute of Technology think might be have a strategy to this problem — one that involves returning to a very old technology to unravel 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 perfecting are nothing like classic vacuum tubes — according on the team, the structures are roughly 1,000x smaller in comparison human blood cell, which would make them 6–8nm. Recognize with modern CPUs simply because suffer from significant sums 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 factors. The properties of silicon apparently change during that point, becoming both elastic and emitting light. “It’s a different material, and it gives you this different behavior,” Scherer told the actual York Times.
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 gold standard for everyone for next several years. It’s still interesting to think about the question: Could such a fundamentally different technology, shrunk to a microscopic scale, solve the problems of transistor scaling and performance?
Maybe — but there’s a associated with problems to solved between here right now 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 all of them with? Can they built quickly enough to maintain current production rates, and in what way will they integrate into existing products?
These might seem like boring questions over a technology’s fundamental promise, but the boring questions are what ultimately determine if or not tech for you to market. When we talk about Intel not being able to build faster CPUs, it doesn’t mean silicon could be the fastest semiconductor ever. It indicates that Intel can’t find a method creating faster chips that’s cost-effective, scaleable, and likely to last multiple product generations.
Miniature vacuum tubes could evolve onto a major driver of PC performance, specially when they could be manufactured at scale, however the cost and manufacturing challenges are an enormous roadblock to any different technology establishing itself as a silicon competing. Neither carbon nanotubes nor graphene have done so, despite huge initial hype. There’s something satisfying in the concept that a century-old technology end up being adapted and improved relevant that it boosts modern computing, but it’s gonna be take for the better of expensive work to prove it does do subsequently.
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