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SAN FRANCISCO: Two non-resident Indian scientists have created history by making the world's tiniest transistor entirely from carbon nanotubes. Nanotubes are rolled up sheets of carbon atoms and are more than a thousand times thinner than human hair. The discovery heralds a new era of ultra miniature electronics where standard silicon transistors are replaced with much smaller versions fashioned from carbon nanotubes. The new transistor is a Y-shaped nanotube with two branches that meet a central stem at a junction. The current flowing from one branch to another can be switched on and off by applying a voltage to the...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Hewlett-Packard Co. said Tuesday that its researchers have proven that a technology they invented could eventually replace the transistor, a fundamental building block of computers. In a paper published in Tuesday's Journal of Applied Physics, HP said three members of its Quantum Science Research group propose and demonstrate a "crossbar latch," which provides the signal restoration and inversion required for general computing without the need for transistors.HP (up $0.25 to $19.59, Research) said in a statement that the technology could result in computers that are thousands of times more powerful than those that exist today.

IBM (Quote, Chart) and AMD (Quote, Chart) have devised a new silicon transistor technology they claim will boost the speeds of single- and dual-core chips. (excerpts) The process, known as "Dual Stress Liner," uses IBM and AMD's jointly developed strained silicon technology and could increase transistor speed as much as 24 percent without using any additional power, the two companies said. IBM and AMD said the technique works without the help of additional new processes, which may be welcome news for chipmakers struggling to boost chip speeds without overheating computer systems. "Innovation has surpassed scaling as the primary driver of...

The calm before the storm describes the mood of the electronics industry over the years following the invention of the transistor. While the winds of the world's dominant leaders were light, several small companies warmed the El Niño currents for the next fifty-year storm. The tides turned in 1954 when Texas Instruments and Regency Electronics shared a joint venture that launched the modern age of miniaturized electronics. The first transistor radio hit the consumer market on October 18, 1954. The Regency TR-1 featured four germanium transistors operating on a 22.5-volt battery that provided over twenty hours of life. Several colors...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have broken their own record for the world's fastest transistor. Their latest device, with a frequency of 509 gigahertz, is 57 gigahertz faster than their previous record holder and could find use in applications such as high-speed communications products, consumer electronics and electronic combat systems."The steady rise in the speed of bipolar transistors has relied largely on the vertical scaling of the epitaxial layer structure to reduce the carrier transit time," said Milton Feng, the Holonyak Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois, whose team has been working on...

Engineers Create World's First Transparent TransistorCORVALLIS - Engineers at Oregon State University have created the world's first transparent transistor, a see-through electronics component that could open the door to many new products. The advance has been reported in a professional journal, Applied Physics Letters, and a patent has been applied for. The university is already consulting with major electronics companies about the findings and their potential applications. The discovery "is a significant development in the context of transparent electronics," the scientists said in their publication, but pointed out it's too early to tell what applications may evolve. "This is a...

A WORKING TRANSISTOR which IBM claims is 10 times smaller than any in production will be demonstrated later today at an electronics conference in San Francisco.IBM said the transistor is six nanometers long and claims that demonstrates there's still life in the devices at this molecular level.IBM said that further work will be needed to achieve both higher performance and the management of power density and heat dissipation. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter, and IBM said that the Consortium of International Semiconductor Companies has projected that transistors need to be smaller than nine nano by 2016 to...