Are there any mysteries in the field of electronics?
Jimbo30
Posts: 129
Every technical field has its mysteries. Are there any unknowns in the field of electronics, though? Just curious!
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Memristor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor
Interesting and I may read into that a little more. Surely, though, this cannot be the only mystery.
Good point!
You didn't get the memo?
Check out this:
http://www.physorg.com/news187421719.html
Of course, one could argue that electronics is "merely" applied physics, but physics is chock full of mysteries.
By the early 1950's we had about plumbed the depths of what was possible with vacuum tubes. If you read some of the electronics literature from that era we had got quite proud of ourselves, and there was lots of talk about hanging a CLOSED sign on that door of the Patent Office. Sure, there were some fellows at Bell Labs working on this interesting semiconductor technology, but it was vastly inferior to what was being done with all the fancy tubes invented during WWII.
Then in 1954 Texas Instruments figured out how to make transistors out of silicon instead of germanium, and in 1960 Bell Labs invented the MOS technique, which led very directly to the first integrated circuits in the mid 1960's. By then computers were starting to look like a big deal, and while transistors still couldn't work at the frequency and power of tubes you could pack a whole bunch of them in a very small space and they didn't eat power keeping filaments hot. When humans went to the Moon, the only vacuum tubes to be found were in specialty applications like magnetrons for microwave communications and vidicons in the TV cameras. Since then, even those applications have gone solid state.
So the question you are really asking is, now that silicon IC production has become fairly mature, what is the next transformative technology that in 40 years might make silicon IC's look as quaint as vacuum tubes did in 1980?
There are several candidates, but I'd say a big possibility is transistors and IC's made of diamond instead of silicon. Carbon is a semiconductor too, and superior in nearly every respect to silicon in the same ways silicon is superior to germanium. The few RL experiments done so far have been very encouraging, with individual transistors switching at terahertz frequencies and gates having much better conductive and insulative properties at small scales. The problem is that we haven't figured out how to fabricate diamond transistors in the mass quantities that we can make silicon transistors.
If we do, it's likely that in the future the computers we are using today will seem as bulky and impractical as a vacuum tube console radio did to the fellow with a transistor job in his pocket in 1970.
RTL, DTL and then TTL predated MOS for ICs. I remember playing with the early Fairchild RTL logic devices in the late 1960s, they were the same as these:
http://semiconductormuseum.com/MuseumStore/MuseumStore_Fairchild_923_Index.htm
I started building a counter/timer using those flip-flops, with four lamp bulbs (no LEDs then) for each decade. They used a 3.6V supply and had very poor noise immunity.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of the biggest breakthroughs will come through understanding how biology manipulates materials at the molecular level. The more scientists look for it, the more they are discovering that life processes directly involve quantum effects: magnetic navigation and photosynthesis are examples of this.
True, and I'm old enough to have worked quite a bit with TTL. That's really another side excursion like germanium transistors that didn't lead directly to today's really advanced technology, and were instantly obsolete for most applications once CMOS came along. Those chips remained faster for awhile, so supercomputers were still made with discrete logic chips through much of the 1980's, but eventually the speed of high density processes caught up.
You know, several years ago I personally identified what might be the fly in the ointment of quantum computing. Qubits are great because you line them up right, maintaining coherence, and the answer to a question requiring vast amounts of computing power just magically emerges. Now, it's hard to maintain coherence, and one of the sure-fire ways to destroy it is to peek under the hood. Now, we all know observing QM processes messes them up, but what constitutes an "observer?" Surely the universe isn't aware that humans are somehow exceptional types of matter with magical properties.
So what I suspect is that the state vector collapses because of the vast computing power necessary to maintain coherence when the potential result tree becomes unmanageable. If that's the case, the universe itself might be set to put a limit on quantum computing.
Of course, that would also mean the universe is something very like a computer, which might not be such a good thing...
Hopefully it is not running Windows if that is the case.
You know, I could swear I have seen that idea before.
http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
(1) Not because of the tech, but because of all the kids on Parallax Forums (2)
(2) Not because of the tech either, but because of what the people in the novel do with their nifty field programmable universe. (3)
(3) If you are underage for an R-rated film, it is reasonably safe to read the even chapters.
I'm still trying to figure out why smoke from soldering always moves toward my face.
I feel honored to have had Phil as a family friend, but unfortunately he died late last year after a year-long battle with a brain tumor. I went looking for mementos after his memorial service a few weeks ago and came upon this interview, and it really does bring back his manner both practical, for our world as it exists, and at the same time out on the edge of a different universe.
There will always be mysteries that defy explanation. And thank goodness for that! I hope I never live to see the complacency that gripped late-nineteenth-century physics, when it was claimed that all that remained was to crank out a few more decimal places of precision. That, of course, was before Einstein shook the foundations of physics with relativity and well before quantum mechanics gained currency.
-Phil