Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Fastest transistor made at UI

From: Rick Parrish <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 03:52:30 -0600

Fastest transistor made at UI

By GREG KLINE
© 2003 THE NEWS-GAZETTE
Published Online January 24, 2003

University of Illinois researchers have muscled aside IBM and other 
electronics industry giants to create the fastest transistor yet, and 
they aren't planning to stop there.
The UI transistor has a speed of 370 gigahertz, compared with the 350 
GHz speed of the previous record holder, which was announced by IBM in 
November. Japan's Nippon Telegraph and Telephone is next at 341 GHz.
“I think in maybe two months we can hopefully get close to 500 
gigahertz,” said Milton Feng, a UI electrical and computer engineering 
professor and an expert in high-speed chip making.
The 500 GHz mark was the goal when Feng and UI colleagues received a 
$2.1 million, five-year grant for the project from the Defense Advanced 
Research Projects Agency in October.
In contrast, the transistors inside the central chip of a powerful 
personal computer run at around 50 or 100 GHz, Feng said. The fastest 
that such a chip runs as a package is currently around 3 GHz.
While you're not likely to find the UI's transistors in your laptop 
soon, you could be holding them in the palm of your hand in the 
not-so-distant future.
The Defense Department is interested in the technology for faster, more 
secure communications and high-speed processing of information from the 
battlefield.
One thing it might be used for is enabling radios and other wireless 
communication devices to reconfigure themselves on the fly. That could 
improve communications between branches of the service, which may have 
differing systems, and help foil enemies trying to tap military 
transmissions, which greater communications speed also would aid.
Likewise, the development could appear in civilian life in the form of 
so-called “soft radio,” radios, cellphones, portable computers and other 
devices with the ability to reprogram themselves to move seamlessly 
between different wireless systems while remaining connected.
It also may have application in areas such as medical diagnostics and 
collision warning systems on vehicles, where processing speed is of the 
essence.
Feng said after reaching 500 GHz, the next step will be to incorporate 
the new transistors into a 40-transistor circuit that can “flip flop,” 
that is change states to reflect zero or one, yes or no, true or false – 
the digital language of computing.
The UI researchers hope to run that circuit, which would be a 
fundamental building block for using their transistors in computing 
tasks, at around 200 GHz.
“It's very exciting for continuing research,” Feng said of the UI's new 
transistor.
Transistors are the electronic signal regulators that have become the 
basic element of modern electronics. They were invented to replace the 
vacuum tube in 1947 by a Bell Labs team, including the late John 
Bardeen, the UI professor who won a Nobel Prize for his part in the effort.
Transistors, by the tens of millions in the case of a computer chip, 
make up circuits that are packaged into chips, the brains of electronic 
devices such as computers.
The UI transistor is made of the material indium phosphide, which Feng 
said has properties that make it naturally fast.
But Feng and UI graduate student Walid Hafez said the new transistor has 
important qualities other than speed. It's both small and low-power, key 
characteristics given the uses envisioned for it, and it handles 
electronic signals cleanly, with little distortion.
“It's about 1,000 times smaller than a hair,” said Hafez, who fabricated 
the transistor at the UI's Micro and Nanotechnology Lab and even spent 
New Year's Eve working on it.
Feng said he thinks the technology is likely to be ready for military 
applications in three to five years. Application in commercial devices 
is probably five years away, he said, seven to 10 years before it's 
cheap enough for mass-market appeal.

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