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HP Claims Breakthrough In Transistor Replacement
By WebProNews
Staff Writer
Article Date: 2005-02-02
An announcement by Hewlett-Packard concerning a technological breakthrough may have ramifications in the way computers are built.
According to HP spokespeople, company developers may have an invention that may replace transistors, a fundamental component when building computers. Reuters reports that a paper published in Tuesday's Journal of Applied Physics, HP's developers introduced a crossbar latch.
…three members of [HP's] Quantum Science Research group propose and demonstrate a "crossbar latch," which provides the signal restoration and inversion required for general computing without the need for transistors.
Palo Alto, California-based HP said that the technology could result in computers that are thousands of times more powerful than those that exist today.
"We are reinventing the computer at the molecular scale," said Stan Williams, one of the authors of the paper. "The crossbar latch provides a key element needed for building a computer using nanometer-sized devices that are relatively inexpensive and easy to build."
However, the group believes transistors will continue to be employed for the foreseeable future. Phil Kuekes, who also helped write the paper, said, "This could someday replace transistors in computers, just as transistors replaced vacuum tubes and vacuum tubes replaced electromagnetic relays before them."
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