Transistors are the basic active elements of electronics, but after almost a century of existence we find that in the future they will have new companions: transitors . And no, it is not a spelling error, but it is the name they receive (or rather that they have been given, inheritance of the term in English? But, what are they and what do they consist of?
In a world like electronics, with processors and memories made up of tens, hundreds and even billions of elements inside it, it is surprising that one of the innovations in the future comes from the simplest elements that make up the chips we use to daily, but the world is not something complex but the complex is built from simple things.
Defining the transients
The trancitor’s proposal comes from the mind of Sungsik Lee of Pusan National University in South Korea. But, first of all, to understand what a transistor is, we have to explain how a transistor works.
A transistor has an output that can be changed depending on the input voltage. This means that in a transistor we can create two different types of currents and it is the reason why computers work in a binary way, with ones and zeros.
But of course, there is no device that serves to do the reverse process, in which we can change the voltage. That is, what we would call a variable capacitor, which we could translate as transients. The reason for this name is that while Transistor comes from the English dimension of Transfer + Resistor , Trancitor , would come from joining the words Transfer + Capacitor (capacitor in Spanish).
The usefulness of the transients
The idea is none other than to join transistors as transmitters in order to simplify electronic circuits in this way, since the use of transmitters allows the creation of simpler structures within electronic circuits, and we cannot forget that a processor is of the type that either is precisely an electronic circuit, although highly complex.
For example, it can be used to create a voltage amplifier, an extremely common part that requires four transistors and would only require one transistor and one transistor.
This means that the circuits that are created from the combination of transistors and transistors will occupy less physical space than those that are built from only transistors as before, and due to this it will be possible to achieve higher clock speeds since the distances that will have than running electrons will be less.
At the moment this is nothing more than a concept on paper, so we cannot say when we will see it implemented in the hardware that we handle on a daily basis, but hopefully it will not happen with another concept, which was proposed in the 1970s. from the 20th century and we didn’t see it come true until the 2000s.
A precedent: the Memristor
In 1971, a young electronics engineer, Leon Chua from the University of California, began to work on the mathematical framework for passive electronic devices, which is based on the relationships between charge, current, magnetic flux. , voltage, etc., and the way in which these electromagnetic quantities can vary as electrons pass through the basic elements of an electronic circuit such as capacitors, resistors and inductors.
In the electronic frame of reference, a current that passes through a resistor creates a voltage, and from that voltage a capacitor stores a certain amount of charge and a current passing through an inductor generates a magnetic flux. But Chua observed that a relationship was missing: the one between the charge and the magnetic flux, from which he deduced the existence of the memristor .
The memristor for years was nothing more than the hypothesis on paper until the Hewlett-Packard laboratories announced that they had made it possible, that was in 2004, and with the physical creation of the memristor they had created a device with the ability to store information without using energy.
Let’s hope that with the trancitors we don’t have to wait so long.