stanwyck@ihlpa.UUCP (Don Stanwyck) (03/18/85)
With regard to all this discussion, my new copy of Telephone Engineer and
management Magazine just arrived the other day. As I was reading it, I was
suprised to read (page 114, 3/15/85 issue) the following (shortened for
brevities sake):
"Some time big news slips opout during a plant tour or press conference.
...We have no way of knowing the true situation in this case, but it stems from
a tour of Bell Labs by a group of journalists, as reported by Business Week.
It seem that Robert Lucky, ..., mentioned to the group that researchers
were working on a "ballistic transistor" that switches at the incredible speed
of 10 femtoseconds (...).
...
The secret of the device, apparently, is that it is built on edge, and
thus the electrons do not have ot travel between two junctions printed on the
surface of the semiconductor material. Rather the direction of motion is up
and down, and thus the gap that the electron has to traverse is the distance
through an extremely thin layer of material. It appears the 10 femtosecond
speed came out of a computer simulation.
..."
No other details here, except to say that both the guy who slipped the
info, and Arno Penzias (VP, Research) both played down the significance of the
work.