HP crossbar could kill transistor

PRINTER GIANT HP claimed that it has made a fundamental invention which will see off the transistor in the future.

The firm has published a paper in the Journal of Applied Physics demonstrating a crossbar latch which gives signal restoration and inversion computers need without using transistors.

That, it explained, could result in computers thousands of times more powerful than existing machines. The crossbar latch uses nanometre scale devices that are cheap and easy to build, said HP.

The technology could replace silicon technology, which is facing fundamental problems in physics and challenging scientists at Intel.

The latch method uses a single wire which acts as a signal line, and that's crossed by two control lines with a molecular scale junction where they insert. Voltage applied to the control lines and using opposite polarity switches allows the performance of the NOT, AND or OR operations. A number of simple gates, the scientists reckon, can be chained together to create computing abilities.

But HP's invention will take a few years before it comes to reality - that's if it is ever taken up. Phil Kruekes, one of the senior computer architects and who co-wrote the paper, said: "Transistors will continue to be used for years to come with conventional silicon circuits, but this could someday replace transistors in computers, just as transistors replaced vacuum tubes (valves) and vacuum tubes replaced electromagnetic relays."

Some funding for the experiment came from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). µ