Remember vacuum tubes? Your grandpa will. Those glowing glass cylinders powered the Golden Age of Radio and made Fender guitar amps scream.There were great big picture tubes right smack in the front of old TV sets, too. Well, tubes are coming back, but they’re smaller.
Much, much smaller. The prototype vacuum channel transistor is 150 nanometers long. A nanometer is 1 millionth of a millimeter; there are 25,400,000 nanometers to the inch. Why make these tiny tubes? electrons travel faster in a vacuum, and tubes resist interference from outside radiation better than semiconductors.
More:
“Return of the vacuum tube – on the nanoscale,” Nanowerk
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Tags: electronics, gate insulated nanoscale vacuum channel transistor, technology, tubes, vaccum channel transistors, vacuum tubes
NotionsCapital 
May 21, 2012 at 12:50 am
Do you think there will be tiny little tube testers at Walgreens?
May 21, 2012 at 8:33 am
HL:
Shown actual size –
—
UK version —
May 23, 2012 at 3:04 pm
UPDATE:
“Return of the Vacuum Tube,” Jon Cartwright, Science NOW