Researchers at the Austrian university TU Wien have developed a novel transistor technology known as Reconfigurable Field Effect Transistors (RFET). Traditional transistors are designed to perform predetermined...
Forward-looking: The billions of transistors hidden within a single CPU are manufactured to execute just one specific function. A team of Viennese scientists, however, aims to introduce programmability features at the most fundamental hardware level of computing technology. logical functions, while RFETs are used to build circuits with functions that can be programmed on the go. RFETs could represent a significant breakthrough in electronic circuit and chip design technology, the researchers explained. Programmable transistors use the same materials employed by the semiconductor industry, silicon and germanium, and they could provide significant improvements in power consumption and energy efficiency. Traditional transistor development involves chemical doping, a technique used to "contaminate" the semiconductor material with foreign atoms. The doping process…