they can potentially be made smaller and better as acoustic devices. This means they would use sound waves instead of electrons to process radio signals.
“Acoustic wave devices are inherently compact because the wavelengths of sound at these frequencies are so small — smaller than the diameter of human hair,” Sandia scientist Lisa Hackett said. But until now, using sound waves has been impossible for many of these components."
[...]
>"Previous researchers hit a dead end trying to enhance acoustic devices, which are not capable of amplification or circulation on their own, by using layers of semiconductor materials. For their concept to work well, the added material must be very thin and very high quality, but scientists only had techniques to make one or the other.
Decades later, Sandia developed techniques to do both in order to improve photovoltaic cells by adding a series of thin layers of semiconducting materials."
[...]
>"Fusing an ultrathin semiconducting layer onto a dissimilar acoustic device took an intricate process of growing crystals on top of other crystals, bonding them to yet other crystals and then chemically removing 99.99% of the materials to produce a perfectly smooth contact surface. Nanofabrication methods like this are collectively called
heterogeneous integration..."
PDS: Let's revisit this quote: "This means they would use sound waves instead of electrons to process radio signals."
So, I'm going to go for "full crackpot" here...
How do we know that electrons aren't sound waves -- and/or radio-wave-like -- in nature?
?
If <thing A> in the universe can be converted into <thing B> via a transducer, then that shows us that <thing A> and <thing B> share a relationship which might not be completely understood according to the scientific reasoning of the day...
Compare to the concept of "identities" in Mathematics.
Once you have a mathematical identity for some term in a math equation, then you can reason about that equation in different ways that you couldn't before -- with the guarantee that because the mathematical identity has previously been proven, the reasoning about the equation, substituting a term with one of its proven identites -- will be correct...
In other words, can we reason about electrons as sound waves, and/or as radio waves, and will the results of that reasoning be correct?
?