DARPA Circuit Achieves Speeds of 1 Trillion Cycles per Second, Achieves Guinness World Record

Officials from Guinness World Records today recognized DARPA’s Terahertz Electronics program for creating the fastest solid-state amplifier integrated circuit ever measured. The ten-stage common-source amplifier operates at a speed of one terahertz (1012 GHz), or one trillion cycles per second—150 billion cycles faster than the existing world record of 850 gigahertz set in 2012.

“Terahertz circuits promise to open up new areas of research and unforeseen applications in the sub-millimeter-wave spectrum, in addition to bringing unprecedented performance to circuits operating at more conventional frequencies,” said Dev Palmer, DARPA program manager.

DARPA Circuit Achieves Speeds of 1 Trillion Cycles per Second, Achieves Guinness World Record

Further information at the link; maybe someone more tech savvy than myself can comment further on this. If we're just now finding out about this, what have they got that they're not letting us in on?

And oh, by the way, DARPA is hiring: DARPA HIRING PAGE

I'm sure your membership at ATS will in no way disqualify you...

a reply to: signalfire

I don't know enough about electronics I guess, but why are Solid State drives and devices so much faster than others? Is it simply that they have no mechanical parts and thus we are only dealing with electron motion, or is there some other attribute at work? How can you access information from different locations on an SSD when you only have a handful of pins coming out of the drive? Is this kind of like an NES cartridge on steroids?

You guessed correctly - solid state devices have no moving parts (except the electrons, I suppose...I'll try not to get too sidetracked by delving into what *that* means!

Your 4TB "spinner" drive has a physical "read head" that must be positioned over the "cylinder" of bits to read. There are very specific physical limatations that prevent that head from moving anywhere *near* light-speed. Plus, once positioned, the head must wait for the particular "bit" to come into read range. Again, physical limitations on "platter speed". For "spinner" drives, these limitations determine access speeds.

With solid-state devices, everything is moving at light speed. It may be that behind those "just a few pins" are a bazillion digital switches that specify what bits are wanted...but those switches (think gargantuan train-switching network) are turned on and off at light-speed (or near-enough as makes no nevermind). So the "access speed" is orders of magnitude above that of "physical" access devices.

I hope that was slightly clearer than mud.

originally posted by: Nechash
a reply to: signalfire

I don't know enough about electronics I guess, but why are Solid State drives and devices so much faster than others? Is it simply that they have no mechanical parts and thus we are only dealing with electron motion, or is there some other attribute at work? How can you access information from different locations on an SSD when you only have a handful of pins coming out of the drive? Is this kind of like an NES cartridge on steroids?