Researchers have developed a new transistor design that uses Germanium to change its configuration on the fly.
The CPUs of the future could use far fewer transistors as a team of researchers have developed a new, adaptive transistor design capable of changing its configuration on the fly. With these new transistors created by researchers at the Vienna University of Technology, future processors could potentially use 85 percent fewer transistors than they do today. However, fewer transistors would also lead to lower power consumption and temperatures as well as higher frequency scaling and performance. In addition to changing how the computer chips of the future will be designed, these new, adaptive transistors will also lead to new possibilities in AI, neural networks and even logic that works with values besides zero and one. While the potential for these adaptive transistors is enormous, one of the researchers behind the project, Dr. Masiar Sistani, explained in the journal ACS Nano that they don’t intend to replace existing silicon based transistor technology but rather augment it, saying: “We don’t want to completely replace the well-established silicon based transistor technology with our new transistor, that would be presumptuous.
