MIT makes chip breakthrough that will allow for tunneling-transistor processors

"The new fabrication method could open the door to more powerful computing if it can be used to produce tunneling-transistor processors. Fundamentally, a transistor is a device that can be modulated to either allow a charge to cross a barrier or prohibit it from crossing. In a tunneling transistor, the charge crosses the barrier by means of a counterintuitive quantum-mechanical effect, in which an electron can be thought of as disappearing at one location and reappearing at another.

These effects are subtle, so they're more pronounced at extremely small scales, like the one- to three-atom thicknesses of the layers in the researchers' experimental chip. And, because electron tunneling is immune to the thermal phenomena that limit the efficiency of conventional transistors, tunneling transistors can operate at very low power and could achieve much higher speeds."

Read more at:

http://phys.org/news/2016-01-depositing-materials-chip-layer...

So it may enable decreasing the epower consumption of processors by maybe 100-1000(from another source). this could really help with 2 things:

In today's processors , we're really limits by heat , so we slow things down, leave a large part of the chip off, etc. Also the transistors themselves are faster.

Currently we cannot build 3D circuits , which may offer a way to continue moore's law for a few years , because of heat."

Taken from laclean on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/438jm6/mit_make...