BBC Documentary Error ?

[cjdelphi]

I watched a doc the other day going over the history of electricity, who discovered what, anyway long story short he went onto the 'future' and the means of a super conductor at room temperature, the holy grail.

now he said if we could we'd save up to 20%, would it not be more like 80%? with the obvious exceptions, heating and cooling, sometimes we need electric to be turned to pure heat to warm our homes, to drive a heat pump for an air conditioner or fridge...

but, surely cpu's and electronics the electrons would flow through the transistors with no resistance in a super conductor, but what if you shorted a super conductor? if the cpu did not produce heat because of the super conductor properties, then what would be the deciding factor for it's clock speed, why not 100 terra herts, no heat? any speed you like? or am i confusing myself so badly here?

if resistance from wire and silicon became a thing of the past, a cpu would require almost no power to run right?

 

[cjdelphi]

http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/whats-on/ou-on-the-bbc-the-story-electricity

Really very interesting, but i'm a little confused as to the role of a super conductor in a computer...... what could be done that's different now?... because linear dc-dc converters create heat as a by product when steping down the voltage, what if the properties were that of a super conductor, now what happens to the heat?!

 

[Laplace]

I don't understand the suggestion. If transistors work because they are made from semiconductor material, then how could they possibly work if you tried to make them from super conductor material?

 

[(*steve*)]

Linear DC-DC converters (i.e. linear regulators) are very inefficient for large voltage differences and/or high currents. There are fat better alternatives (switching regulators) that are far more efficient and produce far less heat.

If one could produce a superconducting mosfet (say) with zero on-resistance, and have a superconducting inductor (careful because magnetic fields can disrupt some superconductors) and use synchronous rectification for the flyback diode -- the power losses in a switchmode regulator could approach zero far more closely than they do now.

 

[cjdelphi]

ok, for example, mercury at room temperature has a fairly high resistance, bring it down to absolute zero, and it has no resistance, no energy loss at all, this would allow a CPU to operate and near 100% efficiency, there would be no heat generated like it is on any modern CPU, but if the material of the semiconductor was super conductive, all the electrons would flow freely and not be losses to the materials in which it travels and converted to heat.

so if a room temperature super conductor could be made, CPU's would no longer become hot, there would be no need to keep them cool, and you could have a 30ghz quad core ARM processor in your phone because no heat would be produced and the transistors would be switching on and off without any resistance, no heat, the cpu itself be that a RISC or CISC chip there would be no need for cooling or fans, energy over the power cables would be gone, cheaper electronics, but how would a dc-dc linear regulator work? there's still losses involved because of how it dispiates the energy? how would a resistor work in a super conductivity semi conductor...

Resistors would simply be a waste of heat, right? in a super conductor semiconductor circuit (if 1 was to be discovered)