Transistor junction, what's your function now? Irish researchers at the Tyndall National Institute have fabricated the world's first junctionless transistor, a nanotech development that could change the way semiconductors are manufactured.

The challenge over past decades has been to keep up with Moore's Law by cramming more and more transistors into the limited real estate provided by silicon chip fabrication methods. But as future tech leans more heavily on smaller, lighter, more mobile devices with increased computing power, the imperative to slim down chip design while increasing efficiency has grown increasingly greater. Read more »

A glimpse of the post-silicon age; how does Graphene Valley sound to you?

Silicon Valley may want to update its name, because IBM has created graphene transistors that blow away the silicon competition. The transistor prototypes were made from sheets of carbon just one atom thick that could switch on and off at 100 billion times per second. The 100-gigahertz speed is about 10 times faster than any silicon equivalents, Technology Review reports.

The transistor creation is supposedly compatible with existing semiconductor manufacturing, and so experts anticipate a scaling-up process that could put transistors into high-performance imaging devices, radar and communication gadgets within the next few years. Graphene-based computer processors might take another decade at least. Read more »