Hybrid race car of transistors debuts

Combining the engines of a Ferrari and a Honda Civic would not lead to a fast, fuel-efficient car. Yet the simple trick of coupling a power-sipping transistor to a high-speed one has created a transistor that excels in both categories without any obvious weaknesses.

“This is a great advancement,” says Adrian Ionescu, a nanoelectronics engineer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.