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What would it take today to make silicon transistors operate at 3.0THz at room temperature? In all honesty, a Godly miracle. But a two-dimensional type of transistor that is predicted to operate at that speed--and at room temperature--is what researchers at the University of Rochester believe they have discovered.
The device is called a "ballistic deflection transistor," and it allows electrons to flow in a straight line without having to make the 3D hops up and down through layers of semiconductor material as they do today. This would decrease the number of electrons required to "fire" a transistor and switch it from 0 to 1, which means it would be much, much faster.
HP pursued a similar technology years ago but abandoned that research because it had to operate at very cold temperatures. The UofR researchers believe they have solved that problem and can operate the circuit at room temperature.
The use of silicon was completely abandoned for their research because of the nature of the circuit. This deflection circuit uses a type of triangle to help steer the electrons along and requires a large "mean free path," which is something scientists call the amount of space an electron can flow in before it hits something in its substrate. For silicon this was only about 10 nm, making it too small to be useful; so, the URochester researchers turned to Indium-Gallium Arsenide and Indium Phosphide for substrate material, which has a mean free path that is 22x as long, at about 220 nm. This allows circuits to be constructed that are small enough (around 70 nm, it seems) without anything else to "bump into" while the electrons are flowing through.
The researchers admit that this theory they've come up with is a long way from a 3THz CPU, but it seems to be the closest we've come to having a reason to leave silicon behind: a room temperature circuit that yields transistor speeds that are at least an order of magnitude faster than their closest silicon cousins, and even those operating on incredibly small feature sizes with specialized cooling. It could be a new big very small thing.
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Posted: 2006-08-29 21:01:47
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