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Comment Re:This is an extremely important accomplishment. (Score 4, Interesting) 77

Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. A mixer is an analog circuit, and silicon carbide is an expensive substrate to work with (very high processing temperatures), so it is typically only worthwhile for high-power analog devices. There is no discussion about anything digital in this article, so this is not related to programming languages or computers. Many analog devices have been made beyond 100 GHz on plain old silicon too; graphene on SiC may be important by enabling greater power density at high frequencies. As a microwave engineer, I'm excited about this, but this needs to happen on an inexpensive IC process for very small devices to be useful for digital circuits.

Comment hold yer horses (Score 5, Informative) 170

Before you get yourselves worked up, realize there is no mention in this article or the original article in "Science" for applying this for computing. There's somewhat of a misstatement in the technology review article - if you look at the actual article in Science (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/327/5966/662), the 100GHz figure is the unity (or cutoff) gain frequency (e.g., how high of a frequency you can build an amplifier) and not switching. There is no mention of switching in the paper by the IBM scientists, and that is the application relevant to computing. Even TFA's expert is talking about using this in analog communication frontends, folks. Sorry.

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