A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have devised a cheap method to make impressively fast and flexible silicon-based transistors. Their technique involves using beams of electrons to create reusable molds of the patterns they want, as well as a very, very tiny knife to etch minuscule trenches into those patterns. The result is a small, bendy transistor — though not as small as a the Navy’s single-molecule design — that can transmit data wirelessly and has the potential to operate at a whopping 110 gigahertz. In other words, it’s capable of some extremely fast computing and could lead to wearables a lot more powerful than those available today.
Office of Strategic Communication