Items tagged with transistor
It looks like a relative breakthrough has been made where materials sciences and nanotechnology are concerned. Scientist Liangbing Hu, stationed at the University of Maryland, turned to one of the most simple materials in order to built a transistor: paper. You might not think of paper as being a good base for anything but writing or packing your stuff for a move, but when treated properly, it can become as thin and clear as glass and plastic. Like regular paper, nanopaper, despite its ultra-thin likeness, can be handled like you'd expect - it can be cut, folded and made into a paper airplane (that one might be a stretch). With normal paper, natural bumps in the surface can stand tens of micrometers...
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The transistor, the fundamental base to all of our electronic devices, turns 65-years-old today. Though the concept of a transistor had been worked on decades earlier, it was on December 16, 1947 when John Bardeen and Walter Brattain operated the first transistor based on a point-contact design. Gold sheets were used as point contacts, separated by plastic, which ran to a piece of germanium that sat atop a metal base. A clunky design, but a working one. While the point-contact transistor was put into production, William Shockley not long after developed a much more compact and easier-to-manufacture transistor based on the bipolar junction design. For their research, Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain...
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Ready to get nerdy? Thinfilm, together with PARC, has just announced that they have produced a working prototype of the world's first printed non-volatile memory device with complementary organic circuits, the organic equivalent of CMOS circuitry. The new Thinfilm Addressable Memory consists of Thinfilm's printed memory and PARC's transistors. This demonstration is a significant milestone toward the mass production of low-cost, low-power ubiquitous devices that are a key component of the "Internet of things." That's right, they said the "Internet of things." That's further described as a situation where "everything is connected to a smart tag." Thinfilm Addressable Memory consists of Thinfilm's...
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Intel announced a major technology shift today in a move that fundamentally changes how the company will build transistors in the years to come. Starting with Ivy Bridge, Intel is adopting what it calls Tri-Gate (3D) transistors. Up to this point, Intel has relied on conventional bulk silicon, but its ability to scale this base technology is coming to an end. As processes shrink, it's become increasingly difficult to prevent current leakage. "For years we have seen limits to how small transistors can get," said Gordon E. Moore. "This change in the basic structure is a truly revolutionary approach, and one that should allow Moore's Law, and the historic pace of innovation, to continue."...
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Made in IBM Labs: IBM Scientists Demonstrate World's Fastest Graphene Transistor Holds Promise for Improving Performance of Transistors YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y. - 05 Feb 2010: In a just-published paper in the magazine Science, IBM (NYSE: IBM) researchers demonstrated a radio-frequency graphene transistor with the highest cut-off frequency achieved so far for any graphene device - 100 billion cycles/second (100 GigaHertz). This accomplishment is a key milestone for the Carbon Electronics for RF Applications (CERA) program funded by DARPA, in an effort to develop next-generation communication devices. The high frequency record was achieved using wafer-scale, epitaxially grown graphene using processing...
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Intel Turbo-Charging Transistors December 10, 2009 - Intel has reached a milestone in its quest to make transistors switch ever faster while using less energy, by integrating a high-k gate with a compound semiconductor transistor. Details were presented this week at the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM). Intel has been researching the possibility of replacing the silicon channel of the transistor by a compound semiconductor material such as indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs). Up until recently, such transistors used a Schottky gate with no gate dielectric, and were subjected to large gate leakage. Intel has now identified and integrated a high-k gate dielectric to reduce...
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This week brought news of two advances in nanotechnology that could bring us ever-smaller devices with ever-increasing capacity.One brought us transistors a mere fraction of the size of most the advanced currently used on silicon chips. The other gave us the ability to store 250 DVDs worth of data on the area the size of a U.S. quarter.First, the transistors:A team from the University of Pittsburgh, led by Jeremy Levy, "created its nanotech transistors using two ceramic crystal materials known as lanthanum aluminate and strontium titanate. When sandwiched together, these natural insulators conduct electricity as a positive charge is passed across them."The big deal is that this is the first time...
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The answer of course is Intel's upcoming Itanium brand CPU codenamed Tukwila.While we tend to focus a lot of our attention on the desktop market, we cannot help but be impressed by server CPUs when we hear figures like 2 billion transistors or 30 MB of on-die cache that make up a good portion of those transistors. “The new Itanium processor will be built on the company’s 65-nanometer manufacturing process and will also be one of the first Intel chips to use the company’s QuickPath interconnect technology—an integrated memory controller. (Advanced Micro Devices already uses an integrated memory controller with its x86 Opteron processors.)”Perhaps the most overlooked benefit of using Intel's...
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It's not like you can see it by looking at the case of iPod or PC, but without the transistor, we would have none of the "magic" electronic devices we now know and cannot live without.Shockley had continued his semiconductor work, and in 1948 patented the modern junction transistor. Three years later, Bell Labs demonstrated part number M1752, though it was apparently produced only in prototype quantities.The modern transistor was born. But it didn't immediately revolutionize the electronics industry, which continued its love affair with tubes. It wasn't till 1956 that Japan's ETL Mark 3, probably the first transistorized computer, appeared, but it used 130 point-contact transistors and wasn't...
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Intel's Tri-Gate Transistor To Enable Next Era In Energy-Efficient Performance SANTA CLARA, Calif., June 16, 2006 - Intel Corporation researchers today disclosed they have developed new technology designed to further extend the company's leadership in energy-efficient performance. Intel's research and development involving new types of transistors has resulted in further development of a tri-gate (3-D) transistor for high-volume manufacturing. Since these transistors greatly improve performance and energy efficiency Intel expects tri-gate technology could become the basic building block for future microprocessors sometime beyond the 45nm process technology node. Planar (or flat) transistors were...
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