Back to the Future. In the world of technology, it happens quite frequently considered obsolete technologies that come back into fashion and are once again used, of course, transformed and adapted to the needs (and constructive possibilities) of the modern era. That much could happen to vacuum tubes, or vacuum tubes, used until the sixties in myriads of radio electronic equipment -from the very first computer, the size of a container. This technology has been supplanted by the first transistor and then by silicon integrated circuits, which are responsible for the current development of microelectronics and are used everywhere.
ever closer limits
the companies that semiconductor manufacturers will be able to produce industrially and on a large scale chip with 10 nm (nanometer technology, millionths of a millimeter) within a few months, but now the physical limits of miniaturization of silicon chips have almost been achieved, and the “race to the smallest”, if not take over technological innovations, will not go on much longer. We are in fact to reach, with the silicon technology, some quantum limits and, to hand hand that the transistors contained in the chips become smaller, the dispersion of the electrons, which generates heat and increases the signal / noise ratio of each element, the risk of become so critical that it is impossible further miniaturization. This might give reason to those who have predicted the imminent end of the law (empirical) Moore, who sentenced as the complexity of a circuit can roughly double every 18 months.
The XXI valves century According to the
though Nanofabrication Group at Caltech (California Institute of technology, Pasadena), the technology of the future will be very similar to that used in the past by vacuum tubes. Obviously, not on is talking of still used vacuum tubes, among other things, for the realization of amplifiers for musical instruments and high-fidelity audio, but of objects that, in fact, using the same principles, but constructed with the latest techniques made possible by nanotechnology.
the team captained by Alex Scherer, professor of electrical engineering, physics and applied physics at Caltech, and the Max Jones students and Daniil Lukin, has in fact it realized that work with the same principles of the “old” vacuum tubes, but with a smaller size sometimes millionth Californian university laboratories the first prototypes of circuits. The researchers have in fact created small metal tubes able to activate or stop a flow of electrons between the four receivers, that aspect seem four pen nibs to extremely close ball between them. The “valves” realized by Nanofabrication Group can be realized in different metals (tungsten, molybdenum, gold, platinum) and this favors the realization of these scale devices “atomic”. The project is being funded by Boeing, and should lead to the creation of marketable products by the end of the decade.
Other research
Note also that the Professor Scherer team is not the only one who is working on this promising “new” technology. Even at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, we are studying the use of vacuum tubes as successors of silicon transistors in processors as evidenced by a report held during EuroNanoForum 2015, in Riga in Latvia, and sealing by researcher Jin-Woo Han and Meyya Meyyappan, chief scientist for Exploration Technology in the same institution.
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