Oh that is pretty cool. I wonder if they have considered them as power switching devices. Something like that which had an effective Rds of nano-ohms could make electric cars more efficient.
> * I wonder if they have considered them as power switching devices.*
It's been a couple of decades since I last looked: The diamond thin-film guys thought that power would be a sensible application. There is a technological hurdle: If you notice in the diagram, the electrodes are pointed. This increases the field at the tip, in order to overcome the electric-potential barrier to emission of the electrons. Reliability issues arise because the emission is occurring over a smaller surface area.
Like I said, it's been a while since I last looked, but vacuum devices have had appeal for power apps for a long time.
Yeah, I'm skeptical about plans to build whole integrated circuits out of them, but these high frequency, low-loss devices could be killer for a lot power electronics applications— motor controllers, DCDCs, etc.
Not sure about high power, but the physical requirement for small size scale combined with the engineering goal of high current is usually contradictory.
I do absolutely think this could be awesome for lower power ultra tiny DC-DC converters though. For instance:
is pushing to high enough frequencies so as to not need an inductor at all. Problem with high frequencies is that usually the efficiency drops, so there's a tradeoff. But if you can avoid the switching losses by moving to a transistor with higher operating frequencies, it might be quite good =)
Or the tiny size might work well for letting you do cool stuff like on-chip DC-DC conversion where you don't need an inductor because it's all so fast...
It's been a couple of decades since I last looked: The diamond thin-film guys thought that power would be a sensible application. There is a technological hurdle: If you notice in the diagram, the electrodes are pointed. This increases the field at the tip, in order to overcome the electric-potential barrier to emission of the electrons. Reliability issues arise because the emission is occurring over a smaller surface area.
Like I said, it's been a while since I last looked, but vacuum devices have had appeal for power apps for a long time.