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Nanoscale Vacuum-Channel Transistor
- mirimir 7y agoWow. Nanoscale vacuum tubes.
- dcminter 7y agoHa, this reminds me of Pratchett's other discworld... "Kin had seen things like it in a museum. It was a valve, a sort of neolithic integrated circuit. Only this was a valve such as might be built by someone who had never developed the transistor, so that more and more ingenuity had been devoted to perfecting the existing technology." -- Strata, Terry Pratchett.
- hilbert42 7y agoI can recall seeing something like this in a magazine decades ago but my recollections are vague—although if I saw the photo of the device that accompanied the article then I'd reckon I'd still recognize it. Essentially, it was a miniature filament-less vacuum tube with I think a silicon emitter/cathode that looked somewhat volcano shaped, the top of which electrons were emitted by electric field emission rather than the more usual thermionic emission. I cannot now vouch for the size of it but a tiny nuvistor, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuvistor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuvistor, along side of it would have been a giant by comparison. I'd be interested if anyone has a better recollection than me and if this is essentially the same device as mentioned in the article.
- mannykannot 7y agoIn this recent article [1], about half way through, the author writes about work on cold cathodes. These are field-emission devices like you describe. Vacuum-channel transistors do not actually use a vacuum, because the channel is much shorter than the mean free path of electrons in air, and they usually cross the channel without colliding with any air molecules, and, despite the field strength, without gaining sufficient energy to ionize them when they do. [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/the-quest-for-the-ultimate-vacuum-tube https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/the-quest-f...
- hilbert42 7y agoThanks for that. It's coming back. I now remember I've seen that article but I wasn't thinking of it when I wrote but another one on the same or similar matter. Seems I've concatenated both together in my mind even though they were written decades apart. That said, the original articles seemed conceptually important to me at the time so at least some of the info stuck. It'll be interesting to see if the technology eventually makes into mainstream. I'd put money on it that it will.
- peter_d_sherman 7y agoI always love reading about weird/esoteric transistors... <g>