News Briefs

A team of Hewlett-Packard scientists has developed a technique that, they say, could potentially replace the transistor. With their crossbar-latch technology, the researchers have built very small junctions of platinum wires that can perform switching and Boolean logic functions now handled by transistors. HP, like other companies, is working on the challenges chip makers face in trying to improve processor performance by reducing the size of transistors and circuitry. A crossbar latch, consisting of two switches, can handle three functions a transistor must perform to do calculations using Boolean logic: signal restoration, which keeps a signal functioning and thereby avoids data corruption; signal inversion, which enables the "not" Boolean logic function; and logical latch functionality, which lets a system store results of one operation for use in another. HP makes crossbar latches via nano-imprint-lithography, a common approach that let companies employ existing manufacturing techniques but that has not been used previously on such a small scale.