Nanoscale Vacuum-Channel Transistor
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Essentially, it was a miniature filament-less vacuum tube with I think a silicon emitter/cathode that looked somewhat volcano shaped, the top of which electrons were emitted by electric field emission rather than the more usual thermionic emission.
I cannot now vouch for the size of it but a tiny nuvistor, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuvistor, along side of it would have been a giant by comparison.
I'd be interested if anyone has a better recollection than me and if this is essentially the same device as mentioned in the article.
Vacuum-channel transistors do not actually use a vacuum, because the channel is much shorter than the mean free path of electrons in air, and they usually cross the channel without colliding with any air molecules, and, despite the field strength, without gaining sufficient energy to ionize them when they do.
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/the-quest-f...
That said, the original articles seemed conceptually important to me at the time so at least some of the info stuck. It'll be interesting to see if the technology eventually makes into mainstream. I'd put money on it that it will.
"Kin had seen things like it in a museum. It was a valve, a sort of neolithic integrated circuit. Only this was a valve such as might be built by someone who had never developed the transistor, so that more and more ingenuity had been devoted to perfecting the existing technology." -- Strata, Terry Pratchett.