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The germanium-tin processor was fabricated at the Helmholtz Nano Facility, the Helmholtz Association's central technology platform for the manufacturing of nanostructures and circuits. Credit: Forschungszentrum Juelich Scientists at Forschungszentrum Jülich have fabricated a new type of transistor from a germanium–tin alloy that has several advantages over conventional switching elements. Charge carriers can move faster in the material than in silicon or germanium, which enables lower voltages in operation. The transistor thus appears to be a promising candidate for future low-power, high-performance chips, and possibly also for the development of future of quantum computers. Over the past 70 years, the number...

The researchers created the tiny transistor by simultaneously applying a force and low voltage which heated a carbon nanotube made up of few layers until outer tube shells separate, leaving just a single-layer nanotube. The heat and strain then changed the "chilarity" of the nanotube, meaning the pattern in which the carbon atoms joined together to form the single-atomic layer of the nanotube wall was rearranged. The result of the new structure connecting the carbon atoms was that the nanotube was transformed into a transistor. Professor Golberg's team members from the National University of Science and Technology in Moscow created...

Researchers have created a field-effect transistor using a single-crystal, “paint-on” perovskite Illustration: North Carolina State University =================================================================== Transistors, and the conductive traces that connect them, are routinely created by the billions on the surface of silicon wafers, which are later cut into the individual “chips” that power our computers, phones, watches, and countless other electronic gadgets. But few people think much about how those silicon wafers are made in the first place. It’s quite tricky. Very pure sand (silicon dioxide) has to be melted, at which point a seed crystal of elemental silicon is brought in contact with the melt,...

Signal amplification is ubiquitous to all electronic and optoelectronic systems for communications, imaging and computing - its characteristics directly impact device performance. A new signal amplification process discovered by a team of University of California, San Diego researchers is now poised to fuel new generations of electrical and photonic devices - transforming the fields of communications, imaging and computing. In the journal Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing, the team describes their work behind this discovery. "For many years, the semiconductor industry has relied on photodetectors for optoelectrical conversion, followed by low-noise electronic amplifiers to convert optical signals into electronic...

A controllable transistor engineered from a single phosphorus atom. The atom, shown here in the center of an image from a computer model, sits in a channel in a silicon crystal. The atomic-sized transistor and wires might allow researchers to control gated qubits of information in future quantum computers. (Credit: Purdue University)The smallest transistor ever built has been created using a single phosphorous atom by an international team of researchers at the University of New South Wales, Purdue University and the University of Melbourne.The latest Intel chip, the “Sandy Bridge,” uses a manufacturing process to place 2.3 billion transistors 32...

For those of you that haven't seen this yet, Researchers from Purdue, the University of Melbourne and the University of New South Wales have created a working transistor from a single atom. Thanks to Robert for the link. We have fabricated a single-atom transistor in which a single phosphorus atom is positioned between highly doped source and drain leads with a lateral spatial accuracy of ±1 atomic lattice spacing. We demonstrate that we are able to register source, drain and gate contacts to the individual donor atom and observe well-controlled transitions for 0, 1 and 2 electron states, in agreement...

Norman Krim, an electronics visionary who played a pivotal role in the industry’s transition from the bulky electron vacuum tube, which once lined the innards of radios and televisions, to the tiny, far more powerful transistor, died on Dec. 14 in a retirement home in Newton, Mass. He was 98. The cause was congestive heart failure, his son Robert said. Mr. Krim, who made several breakthroughs in a long career with the Raytheon Company and who had an early hand in the growth of the RadioShack chain, did not invent the transistor. (Three scientists did, in 1947, at Bell Laboratories.)...

Intel senior fellow Mark Bohr showed off the company’s revolutionary new 3D transistors in an announcement this week in San Francisco. The power, performance, and real estate gains are impressive. Moore’s Law seems to be holding. Video at Link.

Computers keep getting more powerful because silicon transistors keep getting smaller. But that miniaturization can't continue much further without a change to the transistors' design, which has remained more or less the same for 40 years. Five different test structures feature stacks of nanowires with different numbers of levels. The bottom structure has only one level; the top structure has five. One potential successor to today's silicon transistors is silicon nanowires, tiny filaments of silicon suspended like the strings of a guitar between electrically conducting pads. But while silicon nanowires are certainly small enough to keep the miniaturization of computer...

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y. — Gaze into the electron microscope display in Frances Ross’s laboratory here and it is possible to persuade yourself that Dr. Ross, a 21st-century materials scientist, is actually a farmer in some Lilliputian silicon world. Dr. Ross, an I.B.M. researcher, is growing a crop of mushroom-shaped silicon nanowires that may one day become a basic building block for a new kind of electronics. Nanowires are just one example, although one of the most promising, of a transformation now taking place in the material sciences as researchers push to create the next generation of switching devices smaller, faster...

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign developed the microplasma transistor by integrating a conventional microcavity plasma device with an electron emitter. Kuo-Feng (Kevin) Chen and Professor J. Gary Eden, Director of the Laboratory for Optical Physics and Engineering, published their study in a recent issue of Applied Physics Letters. As Eden explained, a plasma transistor could one day have certain advantages compared with conventional transistors. "As you might imagine, this first plasma transistor has not yet been engineered to the degree necessary for a commercial product," Eden told PhysOrg.com. "Nevertheless, it should be mentioned that a microplasma transistor...

Morgan Sparks, inventor of the first practical transistor, dies at 91 ALBUQUERQUE — Morgan Sparks, who led Sandia National Laboratories for nearly a decade and invented a device that has revolutionized almost every aspect of modern life, has died. Sparks died Saturday at his daughter's home in Fullerton, Calif., Sandia said Tuesday in a news release. He was 91. Sparks worked for 30 years at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey before taking over as director of Sandia in 1972. He served in the post until his retirement in 1981. Sandia and Bell labs officials said Sparks invented the first practical...

Intel´s Tukwila chip contains more than 2 billion transistors - twice the number from two years ago. Intel has just announced the first microchip that contains more than two billion transistors - tiny switches that together perform the calculations in computers. The chip, known as Tukwila, marks a milestone in chip density technology. Intel explains that the quad-core chip is designed for high-end servers rather than personal computers. Many of the chip´s two billion transistors are used for on-board memory, helping the system process data faster. According to a news report by the BBC, the chip is based on...

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Sixty years after transistors were invented and nearly five decades since they were first integrated into silicon chips, the tiny on-off switches dubbed the "nerve cells" of the information age are starting to show their age. The devices - whose miniaturization over time set in motion the race for faster, smaller and cheaper electronics - have been shrunk so much that the day is approaching when it will be physically impossible to make them even tinier. Once chip makers can't squeeze any more into the same-sized slice of silicon, the dramatic performance gains and cost...

...A transistor is a little electronic switch capable of amplifying electric current, invented by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley at Bell Labs in New Jersey on Dec. 16, 1947. They jury-rigged the first transistor using a paper clip, some germanium and gold foil, and found that it boosted electrical current a hundredfold. They kept the discovery to themselves for a bit, and showed their bosses the device just before Christmas. Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956. ...To put it in economic terms, if the price of an automobile had kept pace with...

Georgia Tech researchers have fabricated high-performance field effect transistors with thin films of Carbon 60, also known as fullerene. Credit: Georgia Tech Photo: Gary Meek Buckminsterfullerene C60 Using room-temperature processing, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have fabricated high-performance field effect transistors with thin films of Carbon 60, also known as fullerene. The ability to produce devices with such performance with an organic semiconductor represents another milestone toward practical applications for large area, low-cost electronic circuits on flexible organic substrates The new devices – which have electron-mobility values higher than amorphous silicon, low threshold voltages, large on-off ratios...

Stanford researchers' new etching method shows promise for bulk manufacturing of nanotube-electronics. Semiconducting carbon nanotubes could be the centerpiece of low-power, ultra-fast electronics of the future. The challenge is getting them to work with today's manufacturing processes. Now researchers at Stanford University have made an important advance toward large-scale nanotube electronics. They have created functional transistors using an etching process that can be integrated with the methods used to carve out silicon-based computer chips. A major roadblock to making carbon-nanotube transistors has been the difficulty of separating semiconducting tubes from a typical batch of nanotubes, in which about a third...

By developing a low-cost method for making high-performance transparent transistors, researchers at Northwestern University have taken an important step toward creating sharp, bright displays that could be laminated to windshields, computer monitors, and televisions but would blend into the background when not in use. For years, researchers have attempted to make flexible electronics based on electrically conducting plastics that can be manufactured inexpensively. There has been some success in making ones are nearly transparent. But these organic materials have produced transistors with disappointing performance, falling well short of the capabilities of transistors made with inorganic materials such as silicon. The...

A simple tweak to the way common silicon transistors are made could allow faster, cheaper mobile phones and digital cameras, say UK researchers. Devices with the modification have already set a new world record for the fastest transistor of its type. To achieve the speed gain, researchers at the University of Southampton added fluorine to the silicon devices. The technique uses existing silicon manufacturing technology meaning it should be quick and easy to deploy. "It just takes a standard technology and adds one extra step," said Professor Peter Ashburn at the University of Southampton, who carried out the work. "This...

The chip giant wants to use new materials for building chips that would boost processing speed by 50 percent. December 6, 2005 Intel said Tuesday it’s developing a transistor technology that could increase processing speed by 50 percent while using one-tenth the power needed by transistors in an Intel chip on the market today. The chip, which would use new materials allowing electronics to travel faster through transistors, may become the foundation for chips a decade from now, the world’s largest chip maker said. The company plans to detail its research in a conference in Washington, D.C., Wednesday. Researchers at...