We know graphene is tough stuff, but Big Blue’s discovering the substance makes a great transistor too, to the tune of a record-setting 100GHz.
Since the first transistor was demonstrated 62 years ago, researchers have tried to make the device smaller and smaller. Now they’ve finally achieved an extreme point in their quest: A single-molecule transistor. Yes, that’s really, really freakin’ small.
Moore’s Law is mention anytime there’s an advancement in processing speeds, and that may keep happening for another 75 years. Physicists are speculating that, assuming Moore was right, we’ll max out on processing speed at that point.
Just imagine, if everything that used transistors today was actually powered by beautiful vacuum tubes of old. Control yourselves, steampunkers, this 1942 RCA doc “Electrons on Parade” may blow your vintage thought fuses.
A team at Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal have produced the world’s first field-effect transistor based on paper. The paper layer acts as an “interstrate”, with the actual FET components being fabricated onto both sides: so the paper holds the transistor together and acts as an insulator. Amazingly in tests the paper transistor performed better than amorphous silicon transistors and even approaches the performance of state-of-the-art oxide thin-film transistors. Why is this interesting news? Mainly since paper is a lower-cost substrate than silicon, so this invention opens the way for cheap, or even disposable, paper displays, smart labels, RFID technology… basically expect more ubiquitous technology integration in future products. [Physorg]
Just the other day we were banging on about graphene, the new “wonder material” based on graphite, and now a British team has used it to craft the world’s smallest transistor. It’s just one atom deep and ten wide, and we don’t need to tell you that that’s teeny. In fact, it’s more than three times smaller than the 32nm transistors at the cutting edge of silicon-based microelectronics: so it looks like Gordon Moore’s law of transistor shrinkage has a bit of life in it yet.
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This week, the transistor turns 60, and to celebrate, we decided to take an animated look at Moore’s law from the early 1970s to today. Here’s you’ll see most of Intel’s major chip lines, the year they were first introduced and the number of transistors they could support. Watch the numbers go up and up and up, and notice how the chips seem to get more and more colorful along the way. Ahhh, progress!
Organic transistors are appealing for their cheap manufacture and flexible materials. But often when cooling, misaligned molecules trap electrons that destroy the chips’ bandwidth. A new breakthrough in organic, pentacene transistors has found that when these chips are left to sit in a vacuum, the material “self heals” at room temperature, realigning the structure properly.
