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New Exotic Material Could Revolutionize Electronics (sciencedaily.com)

22 points by tihomir ↗ HN
ScienceDaily (June 16, 2009) — Move over, silicon—it may be time to give the Valley a new name. Physicists at the Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have confirmed the existence of a type of material that could one day provide dramatically faster, more efficient computer chips.

11 comments

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tocomment
So is this a room temperature superconductor? The article says no, but only because it has a low current? I don't think there's a minimum current capacity to be considered a super conductor.
lionheart
I believe, technically, a superconductor has to allow electrons to travel throughout the entire body of the material without resistance.

This material only allows the electrons on its surface to travel without resistance. So its not classified as a superconductor.

However, this makes me think, can't we make a version of this in a shape with a very high surface area to volume ratio? Then it might be pretty useful as a superconductor for small voltage levels.

tocomment
Also I'm tired of hearing about all of these revolutionary things and never seeing them become commercialized. I mean whatever happened to memristors? They were supposed to be easy to produce with existing fabrication processes. Why don't we have any yet?
wmf
By the time it's commercialized you've forgotten the original announcement (and the terminology may have changed). Wasn't the memristor announcement less than five years ago?
jodrellblank
All that new stuff that never goes anywhere. e-ink, new lithium-polymer batteries, OLED displays, pocket size projectors, multiple cores, GPGPU and OpenCL, ethernet-over-power and power-over-ethernet, fibre-to-the-home, ADSL2+, VoIP, motion sensitive controllers...

Lots of stuff hasn't appeared yet, but lots of stuff has.

[memristors] were supposed to be easy to produce with existing fabrication processes. Why don't we have any yet?

To do what? Where are you feeling the lack of memristors most?

smanek
Memrisistors (theoretically) can make SSDs that are faster than RAM and denser than magnetic hard disks. You can also build crossbar latches which function as smaller/faster transistors for a lot of purposes.
sp332
Sure, today, you can have one for (say) 10 million dollars. In 18 months, it will only be five million. At an exponential decreasing rate, it'll take over a decade to be under $1,000.
jimfl
Having run a science news blog for a few years in the early naughties, I can safely say that most science news is speculative sensationalism, in which embargoed news items are rarely more than press releases from various universities and national or corporate labs.
sown
The creation of the first memristor was announced last year on April 30, 2008, although they were hypothesized a few decades ago.
nova
Maybe when the patents expire and we get some competition.
vaksel
Is it time to rename Silicon Valley to Bismuth Telluride Valley