Vacuum tubes, according to Dr. Axel Scherer, could be key to improving transistor performance and lowering power consumption.

The vacuum tubes being constructed at Caltech are able to control the flow of electrons without leakage, which could make them a highly efficient replacement for transistors.

Now, researchers at NASA believe they may have discovered a way to kickstart transistors again -- by using technology from the earliest days of computing: The vacuum tube. No, really. Stop laughing.

Which is why NASA's Ames Research Center is going back to the future with its new vacuum transistor -- a nanometer-scale vacuum tube that, in early testing, has reached speeds of up to 460GHz.

It was only in the 1950s, a few years after the invention of semiconductor devices, that the switch from vacuum tubes to transistors took place. Today, we will look at one of the first devices ...

PISCATAWAY, N.J. — Before there was the transistor, there was the tube. Lots of them. Televisions, radios — if it was electronic, it had a tube in it. Then, in the 1950s and 60s, transistors ...

Unlike the tubes of old, however, NASA's vacuum-channel transistors measure the gap between electrodes, not in millimeters but in nanometers. Making them nanoscale has a couple of key advantages.

Today, of course, transistor, chips and wafer-thin flat-screens have largely replaced old-fashioned tubes, but the vacuum tube still glows warmly in many a memory.

The transistor was a solid (thus the term "solid-state technology") but had the electrical properties of a vacuum tube. Yet it had none of the drawbacks: it was cheap, sturdy, used little power ...