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Comment by starbeast | Hacker News Reader

I think that is the general idea, the field below regulates that arc.

edit - This design is so absurdly straight forward, I am genuinely impressed. The damn thing is even reversible. Is cool as hell that this works. I wonder what the pitfalls are?

edit2 for magnat as it is not letting me reply to the comment below - The way I understand it (given it is described as a FET), those two electrodes sit directly on top of a gate. If you flood the gate with electrons, then the gate's negative electric field will keep the electrons in the electrodes away from the gap, reducing or completely halting the flow of current.

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Oh, wow, this is basically a chip full of trigatrons isn't it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigatron

For anyone who doesn't feel like reading the wiki, these things are normally switches you use when all other types of switch would be destroyed by the amount of current you're trying to pass (the pictured device has a mesh cage to catch fragments if it blows up).

If you've ever seen one of those demos where someone 'shrinks' a quarter or crushes cans with magnetic fields, there's a good chance that's what they're using to switch the power on.

Seeing the same concept used in a cpu is bizarre, but really exciting if it works.

It does not seem to use arcs, so it does not use a trigger. It's more suitable to think about this as a triode valve or a FET where the the channel is made of vacuum instead of silicon. (And only comes on N variety, what is not great.)

There is mention of one issue - melting of the tips. They are working on modifying the collector to reduce the stress on the emitter, which suggests that a practical device will not be reversible. (from a sufficiently abstract point of view, transistors appear to be reversible too, but in practice they are not.)

You mean ions/electrons between electrodes are deflected by voltage applied at the gate, as in vacuum tube?

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