As you might expect, this is more of an engineering press release and not a balanced technical discussion. Two things jump out at me: > The nanoscale air gap

As you might expect, this is more of an engineering press release and not a balanced technical discussion. Two things jump out at me: > The nanoscale air gap is less than the mean-free path of electrons in air, hence electrons can travel through air under room temperature without scattering. Electron transport without scattering is usually termed "ballistic transport", and as gate sizes shrink in traditional MOS devices, a larger fraction of channel electrons make it across the channel before scattering. So maybe air gaps might speed up the arrival of mass-production ballistic transistors. However, there is a new problem: To get an electron out of the metal, you need to kick it up to the vacuum level (the electron work function of the material). Giving energy to the electron to get it out of the metal was the reason that tubes had heating elements back in the day. In more modern research, it's the reason why people have been exploring diamond thin-film emitters: It turns out that diamond has the interesting property that the conduction band is above the vacuum level (!), which means that a conduction-band electron will fall out of the material given the chance. (Surface physics gets in the way, which is why diamond engagement rings aren't positively charged rocks, but very cool nevertheless.) Alternatively, you need to apply an electric field to have electrons tunnel out, but usually that corresponds to a very large field where other bad things start to happen (breakdown, electromigration, etc) > Because the electrons flow between the electrodes just as well in a vacuum (think vacuum tube) as in air, radiation will not modulate channel properties, making ACT devices suitable for use in extreme radiation environments and space. When radiation from space goes through an MOS-type device, there are two big problems: 1. Ionizing radiation in the channel creates electron-hole pairs, which creates excess current between source and drain temporarily, 2. Ionizing radiation in the dielectric creates electron-hole pairs in the gate, and often the hole gets trapped in the gate leading to a permanent threshold shift. This eventually causes failure, and is usually the bigger problem when designing a space-qualified process. So while "radiation will not modulate channel properties" is maybe technically right, the press release is ignoring that the radiation will still modulate gate properties, which will in turn modulate channel properties.