transistors
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RepRap prints transistors, but fabs have little to fear
Budding hobbyists almost have it too easy these days, what with all the ready-made components, Mindstorms and Arduino boards, but there's still a couple of folks out there kicking it old-school... and printing transistors at home. Yes, that's a RepRap 3D printer you see there, with a MakerBot Unicorn pen head, depositing tiny dots of silver ink to form intricate rows of tiny electrodes. Sadly, the printer doesn't currently automate the entire process, as you'll also need to separately apply a dielectric material and a host of chemicals to get a working field effect transistor from scratch, but once the basic process is perfected the possibilities, as they say, are endless. Now if you'll excuse us, we've got a hot date with some vacuum tubes. Find the basic formula for DIY transistors at our source link.
NC State patents multifunctional smart sensors, looks to 'revolutionize energy and communications infrastructure'
Bold words coming from a program that choked in epic fashion this past Saturday in front of 58,000+, don't you think? Thankfully for those who are actually involved in the global energy and communications infrastructure (not to mention depressed alumni), NC State's athletics department is far removed from its research labs, and the university's latest development was born and bred in the latter. A team of researchers have managed to patent a new technology that is expected to enable the development of "high-power, high-voltage and high-current devices that are critical for the development of energy distribution devices, such as smart grid technology and high-frequency military communications." The secret? Integrating gallium nitride (GaN) sensors and devices directly into silicon-based computer chips, a feat that hasn't been accomplished by any team prior. According to Dr. Jay Narayan, this newfangled integration has "enabled the creation of multifunctional smart sensors, high-electron mobility transistors, high-power devices, and high-voltage switches for smart grids," and it also makes a broader range of radio frequencies available -- something that'll obviously be beneficial in the advancement of communications. Best of all, a US-based corporation is already in the process of licensing the technology, so it's likely that we'll see this in use in the not-too-distant future. An ACC championship, however, remains far more elusive.
HP Labs teams up with Hynix to manufacture memristors, plans assault on flash memory in 2013
The memristor's come a long way since being hypothesized back in 1971. If you ask HP Labs, the history of this particular memory technology didn't hit its next milestone for almost four decades, when the company produced the very first memory resistor chip. Just last month, the Labs group proved its little transistor could handle logic and data storage, and as of today, the company's announcing a joint development agreement with Hynix Semiconductor, with a goal of bringing these chips to the market -- and rendering flash memory obsolete. That challenge against flash (not a very popular naming convention these days, it seems) was thrown down by HP Labs Senior Fellow Stan Williams, who posits that the memristor is "an universal memory that over a sufficient amount of time will replace flash, DRAM, magnetic hard disks, and possibly even SRAM." But onto the immediate, albeit aspirational goal (i.e. not a commitment, which he stressed on multiple occasions): Williams hopes to see the transistors in consumer products by this time 2013, for approximately the price of what flash memory will be selling for at the time but with "at least twice the bit capacity." He also claims a much smaller power requirement of "at least a factor of 10" and an even faster operation speed, in addition to previously-discussed advantages like read / write endurance. With Hynix on board, the goal is to make these "drop-in replacements" for flash memory, whereby the same protocols and even the same connectors will work just fine. For HP, however, Williams says there'll be an initial competitive advantage for the company due to its comfort level with memristors' unique properties, but that other companies will be encouraged to license the technology and experiment with new possibilities in hardware design. Williams wouldn't give any specific product examples where we might initially see the memristor, except to repeat that it'll be anywhere and everywhere flash memory is. Fighting words, indeed. We normally don't get excited about minute hardware components -- not often, at least -- but we gotta say, the seeds of the future look mighty interesting. Can't wait to see what germinates. Highlights from our talk with Williams after the break. %Gallery-100780%
HP touts memristor development, bleak future for transistors
Silicon transistors are the stuff all our dreams of android sheep are made of, but there will ultimately be a limit to how many of them you can squish together inside a processing chip. The progressive avoidance of physical limitations by moving to yet more minuscule dimensions is admirable, but some folks at HP seem to believe the answer lies in a whole different technology. The company has been talking to the New York Times about its memristor (memory resistor) development, which promises to perform both data processing and storage tasks (even without an electrical charge), while also being capable of stacking in a three-dimensional array that would allow for vast scaling potential down the line. Promises for the future include a three nanometer memristor that can switch on and off in a nanosecond, as well as a 20GB per square centimeter memory density that we might expect to arrive within three years. If we believe the dudes in the white coats, that is. The important thing is that memristor-based storage has already been tested to successfully perform "hundreds of thousands" of read and write operations without failing, so the potential is indeed there. Now we just need a bit of luck and a smidgen of patience.
UCLA nanowire discovery could lead to faster, stronger, smaller electronics
Advancements in silicon-germanium have been going on for years now, but a team at UCLA is convinced that their discovery really is "the next big thing." For scores now, microchip makers have struggled with miniaturizing transistors as the public at large demands that things get smaller and smaller. Thanks to researchers at the aforesaid university, it's looking like silicon-germanium nanowires could be the key to making the process a whole lot easier. According to study co-author Suneel Kodambaka, the new nanowires could "help speed the development of smaller, faster and more powerful electronics," also noting that they're so small that they can be "placed in virtually anything." Which is great, because the Adamo XPS is just entirely too pudgy.
Transistors on paper become a reality
Check it, nerds. A team over at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa has reportedly figured out a way to use paper (yes, paper) as an interstrate component of a Field Effect Transistor (FET). In testing, the group "fabricated the devices on both sides of the paper sheet," thus causing the paper to act as the "electric insulator and as the substrate" simultaneously. Remarkably, results showed that performance actually rivaled that of best-in-class oxide thin film transistors, giving revived hope for the realm of disposable devices like paper displays, labels, intelligent packaging, tracking tags, etc. The findings are scheduled to be published this September, after which we're sure any firms interested in taking this stuff commercial will be putting their best foot forward.[Via Scientific Blogging]
Transparent transistors to power next generation of displays
We've been following this trend of making stuff invisible for some time now, and the short of it is that invisibility doesn't really quite work as much as we'd like it to for now. But a new result from Northwestern University may be the closest to true "invisible" electronics that we've seen thus far -- honestly, they're really just transparent. A group of scientists, led by Tobin J. Marks, a professor of chemistry, materials science and engineering at Northwestern, have just published a paper in Nature Materials that says that it's possible to produce "transparent, high-performance transistors" on glass and plastics. Dr. Marks said that it was conceivable to be able to construct "displays of text or images that would seem to be floating in space," -- such as a heads-up display of a map built into your windshield, or a visual aid built into a set of goggles for soldiers -- and that new displays based on this technology could be commercially available via his new startup Polyera within 18 months. Heck, if we could use an upgraded version of our bedroom window as a ginormous display to watch TV or movies on, we'd toss our 30-inch LCDs and/or plasma screens in a second.
California scientists unveil new way to make organic transistors
Our visions of cheap electronic paper may finally come to fruition, if scientists at Stanford University and the University of California, Los Angeles have their way. A joint team from the two universities just published a paper in the journal Nature, which outlines a new technique for mass producing single-crystal organic transistors (previously, the transistors had to be made by hand). According to the researchers, they can print transistors on silicon wafers and flexible plastic, meaning that soon it may be possible to print external inexpensive sensors for commercial products like future generations of LCDs. Exciting times, people, exciting times.[Via CNET]
Self-healing chips could function forever
Although you may have never given a thought to what transistors do to repair themselves when certain sectors fail, there are a few organizations who make it their life's work. Researchers from the National Science Foundation, the Semiconductor Research Corporation, and the University of Michigan have a mission to complete before their grant money runs dry: to create semiconductors that can heal themselves without the burdensome redundancy currently used. The goal here, which could seem a tad superfluous until you consider these chips operate in things like airplanes and medical devices -- you know, fairly critical applications -- is to design a semiconductor that runs more efficiently and can be counted on to function no matter how crucial the situation. By designing a chip that can auto-detect a problem, then shift the resources to a functioning area while the chip diagnoses and repairs the issue with help from "online collaboration software," you'll get a slimmer semiconductor that suffers no noticeable loss in performance while self-repairing. If this circuitry talk has your wires all crossed up, here's the skinny: more dependable chips will make everyone's life a bit easier, and if the team's plan is free of defects, we can expect to see prototypes within the next three years. [Via Mobilemag]
