Single-Atom Transistor

zarsky99 writes: "EETimes is reporting that Japanese researchers are close to creating the world's first single-atom transistor. This could be a boon to power problems and Moore's Law. The article is here, and please enjoy. Now if they could only get a single girl to date me." OK, you take the transistor, I'll take the girl ;) J adds: For those of you graphing Moore's Wacky Law: November1999, 50nm; November1999, 18nm; October2000, 1nm; December2000, 30nm; five days ago, 30nm. We don't make the semiconductors, we just report 'em.

Comments

What atom would that be?

[Arandir]

Okay, it's been quite a long time since I took high school chemistry, so maybe something radical changed in the field since then. But I distinctly recall only about 200 to 250 possible elements. Which isotype of which element does this single atom belong to?

Oh hell! This can't possibly be right. Not even Japan can alter the laws of physics. Let me read the article to see what the truth of the matter is... ...yes, Slashdot goofed again (does this surprise anyone). They read the eeTimes' equally innacurate headline and never bothered to read the article. Quoting the real information, we find that:

The transistor Aono is developing makes a switch circuit consisting of ... a 10-atom-diameter cluster of 500 silver atoms that acts as a capacitor...

and

"We can make an atomic switch in a cluster of silver atoms"

Very amazing. But it's not a "Single-Atom Transistor" like Slashdot says. The key component in the transistor may be a single atom, but the transistor itself is not.

What do women and transistors have in common

[Anonymous Coward]

- They are often biased
- They often amplify things out of proportion
- They can switch their minds in an instant
- They are often non-linear
- They consume energy

It won't do any good

[Dr. Prakash Kothari]

I feel that too much emphasis is being placed on processor speed today. An important processor is nice, but we need to take the emphasis off of multi-gigahertz processing, and take a step back to develop other components to the same technological advancement. We're rapidly approching a point where a two, five, or even ten gigahertz processor isn't going to improve performance, because it's no longer the limiting factor. I'd love to have my own processor made from single atom transistors, but first, we need to work on improving bus speeds, memory latency, and hard disk access time. Without all of these factors working in unison at high speeds, the only thing you're going to get from an ultrafast processor is a lighter wallet.

Just look at some of the benchmarks on Tom'sHardware. The majority of them are all dead even after processor speeds hit 8 or 9 hundred Mhz.

Some of the newer Athlon processors have 12x multipliers. That means the processor is working 12 times as fast as the rest of the system. This is wasteful, and you end up with a lot of dead processor cycles because the RAM/system bus can't provide enough data for processing. Manufacturer's need to stop throwing money at superfast processor development, and work on improving system bus speeds, and latency/throughput of RAM.