One of the topics we've covered multiple times at ExtremeTech is the difficulty of continuing to scale semiconductor technology, and the related problem of improving chip performance without ...

Way back in the salad days of digital computing (the 1940s and '50s), computers were made of vacuum tubes -- big, hot, clunky devices that, when you got right down to it, were essentially glorified ...

In the past, vacuum tubes were used for amplifying electrical signals, but have long been replaced by other devices such as MOSFETs, which require lower power and less cost to fabricate. Researchers ...

Field emission devices and vacuum electronics represent a vibrant field of research that harnesses quantum tunnelling phenomena to achieve electron emission from sharp, nanoscale emitters. By ...