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by gautamcgoel 1199 days ago
Dumb question: if this can be used for 200 GHz electronics, why is it not useful for digital electronics? Is the power draw prohibitive or something?
2 comments

Almost all logic today is done using CMOS for power reasons. The 200+ GHz stuff is all BJT, which while remarkably fast and less noisy, is generally much more power intensive (orders of magnitude). This makes BJT based designs useful for small to medium analog / RF blocks but not useful for designing a full blown modern microprocessor.

This process integrates both (pretty difficult to do for various physical process reasons) which allows you to combine the CMOS for things like power control and logic alongside the BJTs for extremely high speed analog circuitry.

200 ghz analog amplifiers, not 200 ghz digital logic. Very different circuit design rules.