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Molecule Sized Transistors
IceFoot writes "Bell Labs announced it has created organic transistors with a single-molecule channel length, more than a factor of ten smaller than anything that has been demonstrated even with the most advanced lithography techniques. The really cool part is the transistors assemble themselves: the molecules do the work of finding the electrodes and attaching themselves. Webcast on Wednesday, October 17, 2001 at 3:00 p.m. Eastern time"
What is the transconductance? The maximum switching speed? The gain/bandwidth product? In short, where are all the specs on this transistor that a real engineer would need to evaluate it?
.1 Planck length, if the thing only has gain below 1 Hz it won't be very useful.
I don't care if you can make a transistor with a gate length of
Until Bell releases some more data on how this device can perform, don't get too excited....
www.eFax.com are spammers
While the work done at Bell labs does indeed look unique, this experiment and breakthrough has technically already been done by Prof. James Tour (at Rice University) and Prof. Mark Reid of Yale who, in a very high-tech experiment, showed that a single molecule can conduct. It was similar to the structure shown in the Bell labs work, except it was one benzene rather than two. Tour and Reid also used self-assembly to get the molecules to line up to check conductance. The work was published in Science in late 1999.
Further, Tour and his group have synthesized molecular transistors (he calls them "Moleisters") about a year and a half ago. Unfortunately, I can't bring up his web pages to find the reference to the papers.
-When going for broke, go for Ithaca!
Do not worry about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
Self-assembling layers that are one-molecule thick are really common and very stable. Examples include cell walls (I know where several trillion are), soap bubbles, etc.
Thermal fluctuations have many orders of magnitude more energy (1/40 kT, where k is Boltzmann's constant) than the quantum mechanical fluctuations associated with the uncertainty principle. Since room temperature doesn't make these things fall apart we can immediately stop worrying about quantum fluctuations. Also, 1 nm is big enough that quantum tunneling of electrons isn't a problem, especially at 5 V (or whatever they use in chips). The scanning tunneling microscope uses gaps that are ten times smaller and voltage differences that are thousands of times larger.
One of these days/I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
Defect tolerance is central to the science of nanotechnology and addresses the very concern you raised. Essentially, when you're working with stuff this small, you assume that some things are going to be defective. The real juicy idea is writing software for these kinds of systems that assumes a certain amount of defects and works around them. Try writing a garbage collector for that!
it depends, if they're running at higher frequencies the power usage will increase. Plus with smaller transistors they usually pack more on a circuit, so more power is required.
However, the power required to switch a transistor is proportional to the *square* of the voltage, so if you can lower the voltage required you've got a big win. And with smaller feature size (miniaturization) they might lower the operating voltage a bit. So the answer is....it depends.