Tube🌿Timethis is a Nuvistor! it's a super-advanced vacuum tube that could have beaten the transistor.
in 1959, RCA took their tube-making expertise and made this micro miniature tube almost as small as a 1950s transistor
RCA developed all new equipment to make it. this machine seals a batch of Nuvistors automatically!
in the 1950s, tubes still had advantages over transistors -- they even lasted longer!
so how did they miniaturize the Nuvistor? time to cut one in half. check out the cross section!
i'd annotate my photo, but RCA published a really nice cutaway diagram, so i will show you that instead.
Nuvistors found their way into some high end applications but transistors surpassed them in a few years, and they just faded away.
fascinating to imagine an alternate reality where transistors never worked and people figured out how to miniaturize vacuum tubes, etching arrays of them on metal wafers and building computers. In fact, they could even have built the entire Internet using a series of tubes.
David Fox 🌻🥸@tubetime What #AdobeFirefly thinks it would look like. #GenerativeAI
Prompt: long shot of thousands 1 millimeter tall nuvistors lying on huge printed circuit boards.
Glen Akins@tubetime MEMS before chips! And last I looked, the Internet was a series of tubes.
Brian Danger Hicks@tubetime I do remember that year or so when SEDs were going to be the hot new display technology and we were all going to get separate CRTs for all of our subpixels
Matt
Rachel Greenham@tubetime nah, gimme Babbage-Lovelace engines humming away at nano-scale 😀
Winchell Chung ⚛🚀@tubetime that was actually part of the background of the scifi table top role playing game GURPS Lensman.
Neko May@tubetime So Fallout? :D
SuperIlu@tubetime I think you just invented a new subgenre of science fiction: Tubepunk.
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SpeakerToManagers
Trammell Hudson@tubetime the Vacuum Transistor allows fabrication of chip-scale vacuum tubes on normal CMOS process. These devices switch in the terrahertz range and require neither a heated filament nor a vacuum, since the source-to-drain distance is shorter than the mean free path (which means electrons won't hit any other atoms along the way): https://spectrum.ieee.org/introducing-the-vacuum-transistor-a-device-made-of-nothing
Gerbrand van Dieyen
48kRAM
Norman Wilson
Wilmhit until peace prevails
Account: Computers
void_ptr@pro @tubetime @th cursory googling shows that progress continues https://physicsworld.com/a/nasa-scientists-design-a-nanoscale-complementary-vacuum-field-emission-transistor/
benjohn
Marc Jacobs@th @tubetime The article is from ~10 years ago.
I did a search after reading and it seems like these two scientists at Ames are doing most of the publishing on the subject.
Fascinating stuff, especially for TeraHertz radios. Would love to see this commercialized.
Side note: at my first job, we used vacuum tube RF supplies in plasma etchers, to make 0.9 um CMOS. Metal can triodes.
Dave Irving
Jazz Rabbit 🐇🏳️⚧️
Trammell Hudson (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image @[email protected] the Vacuum Transistor allows fabrication of chip-scale vacuum tubes on normal CMOS process. These devices switch in the terrahertz range and require neither a heated filament nor a vacuum, since the source-to-drain distance is shorter than the mean free path (which means electrons won't hit any other atoms along the way): https://spectrum.ieee.org/introducing-the-vacuum-transistor-a-device-made-of-nothing
Nick Poole@madrabbit @th I love these things! I wish I had access to nano-scale manufacturing so I could play with them!
JamesAkers
Stephen Bannasch (316 ppm)@th @tubetime an open access review article from 2023: "Review of Nanoscale Vacuum Devices" https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/12/4/802
Review of Nanoscale Vacuum Devices
The newly developed nanoscale vacuum devices have basic functions similar to traditional vacuum tubes, but can be manufactured by existing silicon-based process lines to achieve small size, light weight, and high integration, which makes them attractive, especially in the recent decade. The historic development and the state-of-the-art of the nanoscale vacuum devices are reviewed. It is found that the devices with lateral, vertical, and gate-all-around structures all have their own advantages and drawbacks. Silicon has the most mature process, but the silicon nanoscale vacuum devices show poor electrical properties and low endurance to harsh conditions when compared with their metal or wide bandgap semiconductor competitors. Even though the most developed nanoscale vacuum devices today still cannot cope with the solid-state devices or integrated circuits (ICs) in most normal applications, they are expected to be first employed in environments with high temperatures or strong radiation.
Mike Spooner@tubetime There is progress on the latter, sort of:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/introducing-the-vacuum-transistor-a-device-made-of-nothing
scrottie (he/him/them)@tubetime Neat! Figured tubes kept the same form factor. Er, up until https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/VX50BA--vox-vx50ba-50-watt-bass-combo-amp and https://www.korgnutube.com/en , much more recently. And curious for your thoughts on those.
Ove Gram Nipen@tubetime Ted Stevens approves.
bhtooefr@bhtooefr you caught me!
Alistair YoungIn my science-fiction universe, I call this technology "electron plumbing".
(While semiconductors did come to be there, electron plumbing still owns the high-power applications.)
Greg Smith
jack the nonabrasive@tubetime reminds me of the Robert Symons quote in this piece on cold-cathode traveling wave tubes:
“If the transistor had been invented first, the vacuum tube would have been invented immediately afterwards.”
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-quest-for-the-ultimate-vacuum-tube#toggle-gdpr
pcbeard