The Vacuum Transistor: A Device Made of Nothing
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The Vacuum Transistor: A Device Made of Nothing
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Re: The Vacuum Transistor: A Device Made of Nothing
#2I'm surprised the IEEE editors allowed the word "Introducing" in the title. Vacuum FETs are often a target of the diamond thin-film community. (Diamond has a very interesting electronegativity: Very little energy is required to get an electron out of diamond and into the "vacuum" (usually air.))
Re: The Vacuum Transistor: A Device Made of Nothing
#3I'm surprised the IEEE editors allowed the word "Introducing" in the title. Vacuum FETs are often a target of the diamond thin-film community. (Diamond has a very interesting electronegativity: Very little energy is required to get an electron out of diamond and into the "vacuum" (usually air.))
Ok, we'll at least take it out of the title here.
Re: The Vacuum Transistor: A Device Made of Nothing
#4I'm surprised the IEEE editors allowed the word "Introducing" in the title. Vacuum FETs are often a target of the diamond thin-film community. (Diamond has a very interesting electronegativity: Very little energy is required to get an electron out of diamond and into the "vacuum" (usually air.))
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Re: The Vacuum Transistor: A Device Made of Nothing
#5I'm surprised the IEEE editors allowed the word "Introducing" in the title. Vacuum FETs are often a target of the diamond thin-film community. (Diamond has a very interesting electronegativity: Very little energy is required to get an electron out of diamond and into the "vacuum" (usually air.))
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Re: The Vacuum Transistor: A Device Made of Nothing
#6I'm surprised the IEEE editors allowed the word "Introducing" in the title. Vacuum FETs are often a target of the diamond thin-film community. (Diamond has a very interesting electronegativity: Very little energy is required to get an electron out of diamond and into the "vacuum" (usually air.))
I don't understand - why not "introducing" - it seemed to be an introductory level article on the topic of "vacuum transistors"?
Re: The Vacuum Transistor: A Device Made of Nothing
#7Oh that is pretty cool. I wonder if they have considered them as power switching devices. Something like that which had an effective Rds of nano-ohms could make electric cars more efficient.
Re: The Vacuum Transistor: A Device Made of Nothing
#8Oh that is pretty cool. I wonder if they have considered them as power switching devices. Something like that which had an effective Rds of nano-ohms could make electric cars more efficient.
Yeah, I'm skeptical about plans to build whole integrated circuits out of them, but these high frequency, low-loss devices could be killer for a lot power electronics applications— motor controllers, DCDCs, etc.
Re: The Vacuum Transistor: A Device Made of Nothing
#9I'm surprised the IEEE editors allowed the word "Introducing" in the title. Vacuum FETs are often a target of the diamond thin-film community. (Diamond has a very interesting electronegativity: Very little energy is required to get an electron out of diamond and into the "vacuum" (usually air.))
The problem is with carbon in general is it has a band gap 5x larger then Silicon. Which overall (but not entirely) means if you want to build a transistor with Diamond (or graphene) you need to put 5x as much voltage into it.
The reason graphene is great for transistors is with its higher band energy its 5x harder for it to soft set itself. So if we pretend todays 11nm transistors have a 1% chance of electron tunneling, carbon would have a 0.2%.
The problem is that same switch would take 5x as much power to switch. Which means a modern 220w cpu would now need 1100watts of power :x
Re: The Vacuum Transistor: A Device Made of Nothing
#10Oh that is pretty cool. I wonder if they have considered them as power switching devices. Something like that which had an effective Rds of nano-ohms could make electric cars more efficient.
> * I wonder if they have considered them as power switching devices.*
It's been a couple of decades since I last looked: The diamond thin-film guys thought that power would be a sensible application. There is a technological hurdle: If you notice in the diagram, the electrodes are pointed. This increases the field at the tip, in order to overcome the electric-potential barrier to emission of the electrons. Reliability issues arise because the emission is occurring over a smaller surface area.
Like I said, it's been a while since I last looked, but vacuum devices have had appeal for power apps for a long time.