The biggest hurdle in building a transistor that uses quantum effects to move electrons is that the transistor needs to be kept at incredibly low temperatures, a drawback common to anyone who has worked with superconductors. Since the hoped for benefit of using quantum effect transistors is to avoid the heat generated in current silicon based models, it defeats the entire purpose of the project if you still need a custom cooling solution. According to this article at The Register you might not need to worry about supercooling your transistors thanks to work being done by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the MTU group who have created a transistor made up of three nanometer gold quantum dots, insulated by boron nitride nanotubes which successfully transferred electrons at room temperature. You will not be seeing this technology in consumer products any time soon and the boffins in the EUV lithographic business come up with a few new tricks in the mean time.
"The world might still be 20 years from the end of Moore's Law, but the hunt for technologies to replace semiconductors is going on right now. A group from Michigan Technological University is offering one such alternative: a quantum tunnelling transistor that operates at room temperature."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Graphene QDs on aligned carbon nanotubes ramp up supercapacitor performance @ Nanotechweb
- Price gap between Haswell and Ivy Bridge notebooks may reach 40% in July @ DigiTimes
- Getting Started With the BeagleBone Black: A 1GHz ARM Linux Machine for $45 @ Linux.com
- Rumor: Ivy Bridge-E Core i7 4960X Delidded – Uses Solder, Not Paste @ hardCOREware
- Privacy expert dismisses PRISM-busting typeface as 'art project' @ The Register
- Pink Floyd blasts Pandora for 'tricking' artists with petition @ The Register
It looks like someone has
It looks like someone has been reading too much of “The Register.” Boffins?!
the boffins can keep working
the boffins can keep working on this, but the software boffins need to do more work keeping the OSs, drivers, and other system software up to date with last years hardware!
I am hoping that all this hardware advancement would slow down, to give the boffin/coders some time to develop software that can actually take advantage of the hardware boffins achievements, beacuse certain CPU makers are Known for making hardware for one generations CPUs that will never be utilized until 2 CPU generations later by the software, and you can bet that the CPU generation that introduced the hardware will never get a chance to use it beacuse the software that finally uses it will never be offered for older system!