IBM Smashes 500GHz Barrier
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So, you thought your 3.4GHz PC was pretty nifty eh? Well, I don’t want to rain on your parade but the white coats at IBM and Georgia Institute of Technology have just succeeded in getting a silicon-germanium (Si-Ge) transistor to operate at frequencies above 500GHz. Mind you, I wouldn’t worry too much about it coming to a motherboard near you anytime soon; the device in question had to be cryogenically frozen, and getting one transitor to operate at this speed is a very long way from doing it on a commercially viable scale, let along shoehorning the contents of small fridge-freezer into a CPU sized box. Nevertheless, the experiments prove that there is still plenty of life left in silicon semiconductor technology.
