It may not be to everyone's taste, but this brand new monobloc amplifier from McIntosh cleverly blends both vacuum tube and solid-state technology in one chassis. If you’re not a serious audiophile ...

The telephone company had problems with vacuum tubes, too, and hoped to find something else to use for switching telephone calls. The idea of somehow using semiconductors (solid materials such as ...

A vacuum tube, known as the first electronic device, is used to switch, amplify, or commutate electric signals. In the past, vacuum tubes functioned as a main part of a diverse range of electronic ...

Prior to Bell Labs’ first working transistor in 1947, which ushered in the advent of semiconductor technology and the computer age, every long-distance telephone call, radio and television broadcast, ...

Way back in the salad days of digital computing (the 1940s and '50s), computers were made of vacuum tubes -- big, hot, clunky devices that, when you got right down to it, were essentially glorified ...

One of the topics we've covered multiple times at ExtremeTech is the difficulty of continuing to scale semiconductor technology, and the related problem of improving chip performance without ...

Integrated circuits (ICs) serve as the basis of computers, tablets, smartphones, and other technology that enhances our daily life. For around 60 years, those circuits have been made from silicon with ...