Long Answer:The point of 'Architectures' is to implement a plan on how a computer is to be built as a system (input -> output). This is what makes an ARM, an x86, a POWER, etc. How the system is implemented (which this scope is the microarchitecture, and below that scope, the logic). The kernel does not know what lies below the architecture and any elements of exposed microarchitecture. Since this are feild effect transistors, they could work in cmos topographies. Maybe not as simply as current VLSI, but could be layed out in a similar fashion.
Benjamin Long
Sorry, I meant:
Short answer: programming would not change. Even assembly languages would not change.
Alexander Fisher
OK since no one wants to search through it, here is a list.
Advantages/disadvantages: >Why did vacuum tubes give way to solid-state electronics so many decades ago? The advantages of semiconductors include lower costs, much smaller size, superior lifetimes, efficiency, ruggedness, reliability, and consistency. Notwithstanding these advantages, when considered purely as a medium for transporting charge, vacuum wins over semiconductors. Electrons propagate freely through the nothingness of a vacuum, whereas they suffer from collisions with the atoms in a solid (a process called crystal-lattice scattering) this is partly what causes high temperatures. What’s more, a vacuum isn’t prone to the kind of radiation damage including thermal that plagues semiconductors, and it produces less noise and distortion than solid-state materials.
Reason for transistor rule up until now:
Kayden Gomez
Why this is important: We’ve been working to develop yet another candidate to replace the MOSFET, one that researchers have been dabbling with off and on for many years: the vacuum-channel transistor. It’s the result of a marriage between traditional vacuum-tube technology and modern semiconductor-fabrication techniques. This curious hybrid combines the best aspects of vacuum tubes and transistors and can be made as small and as cheap as any solid-state device. Indeed, making them small is what eliminates the well-known drawbacks of vacuum tubes. In a vacuum tube, an electric filament, similar to the filament in an incandescent lightbulb, is used to heat the cathode sufficiently for it to emit electrons. This is why vacuum tubes need time to warm up and why they consume so much power. It’s also why they frequently burn out (often as a result of a minuscule leak in the tube’s glass envelope). But vacuum-channel transistors don’t need a filament or hot cathode. If the device is made small enough, the electric field across it is sufficient to draw electrons from the source by a process known as field emission. Eliminating the power-sapping heating element reduces the area each device takes up on a chip and makes this new kind of transistor energy efficient. Another weak point of tubes is that they must maintain a high vacuum, typically a thousandth or so of atmospheric pressure, to avoid collisions between electrons and gas molecules. Under such low pressure, the electric field causes positive ions generated from the residual gas in a tube to accelerate and bombard the cathode, creating sharp, nanometer-scale protrusions, which degrade and, ultimately, destroy it. What if the distance between cathode and anode were less than the average distance an electron travels before hitting a gas molecule, a distance known as the mean free path? Then you wouldn’t have to worry about collisions between electrons and gas molecules. For example, the mean free path of electrons in air under normal atmospheric pressure is about 200 nanometers, which on the scale of today’s transistors is pretty large. Use helium instead of air and the mean free path goes up to about 1 micrometer. That means an electron traveling across, say, a 100-nm gap bathed in helium would have only about a 10 percent probability of colliding with the gas. Make the gap smaller still and the chance of collision diminishes further. But even with a low probability of hitting, many electrons are still going to collide with gas molecules. If the impact knocks a bound electron from the gas molecule, it will become a positively charged ion, which means that the electric field will send it flying toward the cathode. Under the bombardment of all those positive ions, cathodes degrade. So you really want to avoid this as much as possible. Fortunately, if you keep the voltage low, the electrons will never acquire enough energy to ionize helium. So if the dimensions of the vacuum transistor are substantially smaller than the mean free path of electrons (which is not hard to arrange), and the working voltage is low enough (not difficult either), the device can operate just fine at atmospheric pressure. That is, you don’t, in fact, need to maintain any sort of vacuum at all for what is nominally a miniaturized piece of “vacuum” electronics! But how do you turn this new kind of transistor on and off? With a triode vacuum tube, you control the current flowing through it by varying the voltage applied to the grid—a meshlike electrode situated between the cathode and the anode. Positioning the grid close to the cathode enhances the grid’s electrostatic control, although that close positioning tends to increase the amount of current flowing into the grid. Ideally, no current would ever flow into the grid, because it wastes energy and can even cause the tube to malfunction. But in practice there’s always a little grid current. To avoid such problems, we control current flow in our vacuum-channel transistor just as it’s done in ordinary MOSFETs, using a gate electrode that has an insulating dielectric material (silicon dioxide) separating it from the current channel. The dielectric insulator transfers the electric field where it’s needed while preventing the flow of current into the gate. So you see, the vacuum-channel transistor isn’t at all complicated. Indeed, it operates much more simply than any of the transistor varieties that came before it. Our very first effort to fashion a prototype produced a device that could operate at 460 gigahertz—roughly 10 times as fast as the best silicon transistor can manage.
That's neat.
Mason Carter
So can we make an EMP-proof machine using vacuum transistors and fibre optics? Is the next step then to EMP the world and become kings?
All of a sudden I remembered the caste of academics/priests tending a long dead AI from the novel The Postman.
Gabriel Edwards
i don't think a vacuum tube would do shit against an EMP. EM waves don't need a medium to travel through like sound waves. they propagate through space itself. otherwise we wouldn't be able to detect shit like gamma bursts out in the vacuum of space. honestly, if you're worried about an EMP, you'd be better off wrapping your shit with aluminum foil for a makeshift Faraday cage.
Gavin Robinson
It's not that a vacuum would block EMP in some way, because you're correct - EM waves don't need a medium to travel through. What makes vacuum tubes resistant to EMP is that a vacuum is empty; there's nothing in there for an EMP to fuck with.
Jacob Bennett
You don't understand. EMP kills systems by causing a power surge. Tubes have several orders of magnitude larger voltage tolerances, so you need a proportionally stronger EMP to destroy them (although they'd probably still crash and need to be reset).
