Tiny freezers promise fab semi overclocking

THAT LOT at New Scientist is forecasting that soon we'll have fridges as low as 0.1 Kelvin - which is quite cold, a reader tells us. [Isn't he a journalist at VNU Business? Ed.]

The nifty little refrigeration units promise coolers sandwiched on a little bit of metal, insulator and a semiconductor.

And, claim the New Scientist hacks, the quantum tunnelling effect will kick in and the boffs have managed to put four such little fridges on a chip made of the element Silicon and quoted in its nitride.

So perhaps Pentium 4 with Netburst will be able to clock above 4GHz after all? Or is that a pipedream? More here. µ