Dr. Scherer isn’t looking to reinvent the transistor or
replace the silicon economic system. Boeing is funding his research because of
its ability applications in area and aviation technology, and silicon will
manifestly be the gold fashionable for anyone for years to come. It’s still
thrilling to bear in mind the question: ought to this kind of basically exclusive
generation, reduced in size to a microscopic scale, solve the issues of
transistor scaling and overall performance?
perhaps — but there’s quite a few issues to be solved
between here and there. First, there’s the query of producing — can we crank
out tens of thousands of vacuum-based processors in a month? What does it cost
to construct these solutions, transfer out manufacturing hardware, and build an
atmosphere around them? Can they built fast enough to hold current
manufacturing quotes, and the way will they combine into existing product
lines?
those might seem like dull questions compared to a era’s
essential promise, but the dull questions are what in the long run decide
whether or not or not tech involves marketplace. when we speak about Intel now
not being capable of construct faster CPUs, it doesn’t suggest silicon is the
quickest semiconductor ever. It approach that Intel can’t discover a way of
building faster chips that’s value-powerful, scaleable, and probably to closing
a couple of product generations.
Miniature vacuum tubes could evolve into a first-rate
driving force of laptop performance, specifically if they can be synthetic at
scale, however the value and production demanding situations are a big
roadblock to any one-of-a-kind era establishing itself as a silicon competitor.
Neither carbon nanotubes nor graphene have performed so, in spite of huge
preliminary hype. There’s some thing pleasing in the idea that a
century-antique technology could be tailored and advanced to the point that it
boosts contemporary computing, however it’s going to take an lousy lot of
expensive work to prove it could achieve this.
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