News New transistors switch at nanosecond speeds and deliver remarkable durability — ferroelectric material transistor could revolutionize electronics,...

[Admin]

The MIT research team used this new ferroelectric material in a transistor that could serve as the backbone of our digital world a decade from now.

New transistors switch at nanosecond speeds and deliver remarkable durability — ferroelectric material transistor could revolutionize electronics,... : Read more

 

[bit_user]

Current transistor technology switch states in the order of hundreds of nanoseconds, but this new material could potentially cut this down to a fraction of that.

This would seem at odds with having CPUs that clock at 6 GHz and above. That's a mere 0.167 ns per cycle. Please explain.

Current SSDs have a limited lifespan, with the top-of-the-line models capable of writing 700TB for every 1TB capacity. On the other hand, this transistor showed no signs of degradation even after 100 billion switches, potentially giving birth to archival flash storage.

No, you're confusing endurance with offline data retention. They're mostly unrelated.

 

[JTWrenn]

This would seem at odds with having CPUs that clock at 6 GHz and above. That's a mere 0.167 ns per cycle. Please explain.

Wonder if this is just poorly explained on what this material is for by saying transistors. Possibly a non volatile storage transistor? I think this is not a processor transistor which are much faster as they don't store anything really...their cache does but that's a different thing.

Still oddly written and poorly explained.

 

[bit_user]

Wonder if this is just poorly explained on what this material is for by saying transistors. Possibly a non volatile storage transistor?

Unless it's not? The original article doesn't say anything about it being specific to SSDs or nonvolatile storage. They do touch on it, but they also mention application areas of "high-performance computing and data processing".

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/mit-ultrathin-ferroelectric-transistor
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I think the Toms author just padded out this article with flights of fancy, since the original article was already pretty short.

I think this is not a processor transistor which are much faster as they don't store anything really...their cache does but that's a different thing.

A single transistors doesn't store anything. A memristor does, but those are fundamentally different.

In SRAM, it seems that a network of transistors is used to trap charge, if I understand correctly. However, DRAM cells employ capacitors for charge storage.

 

[deesider]

The original Science article that is the source of the article is here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp3575

The title is "Ultrafast high-endurance memory based on sliding ferroelectrics" - so the subject is certainly memory rather than transistors used for logic, and it does reference non-volatile memory.

Unfortunately though, I don't have access to the full article.