Progress Toward Single Molecule Transistors

Fungii writes "There is an amazing story over at sciencedaily.com saying two research teams have managed to create single molecule transistors, looks like we don't have to worry about limitations on feature sizes for a while."

Comments

Cooling/Power requirements for these beasties...

[Anonymous Coward]

It took twenty odd years for power suppplies to catch up with the power stability requirements of the Feild Effect Transistor (yes, the lowly FET). It wasn't a viable device (it was rediscovered when it's proof-of-concept fell out of a cabinet) until supplies were rock-stable. I wonder how many years until powersupplys will be stable enough to support these beasts.. Looks like we're going to be looking at pico to nano amp/volt stability requirements.

I wonder what the cooling requirements for a 60 Ghz 0.5 volt cpu is going to be? :)

yeah just mask cost

[johnjones]

who cares if you cant actually use the damn thing

mask costs are about $2million for .13 or .9

so its not the same and relatively few people can afford it

unless you share and then you can only really get engineering samples

AMD made the smart move of UMC and TSMC are just ARM/MIPS prod lines with some custom phillips stuff

IBM, Intel and maybe TI are the only people who can aford to do this anymore....

if you wanted me to put money on it I would bet IBM and the rest wither (yes Intel will outsource eventually)

regards

john jones

Re:Fabrication?

[Animats]

Right now, the mask makers are ahead of the transistor designers. I went to a talk recently where images were shown of lines fabbed using subwavelength interference masks. This wasn't extreme UV; this was stuff you could do in an existing fab. They could lay out lines and transistor geometries an order of magnitude smaller than current production. But the transistors don't work. Just scaling down existing transistor designs doesn't work electrically. That problem can probably be overcome; though. The people talking were just making better masks, leaving the device physics problem will be addressed by others. This new result indicates that we're not out of room on the device physics end.

Despite all this, everyone agrees that some time around 2015, plus or minus a few years, we hit the fundamental limit on flat silicon wafers: the atoms are too big.

There may be ways around that, but remember that the real limit is cost per gate. A technology that provides higher density at higher cost per gate isn't going anywhere. After all, even now, the physical space taken up by ICs isn't a problem.

Integration?

[RobertTheBrute]

This is indeed grand news but there are many obstacles between developing a single molecule transistor and building microprocessors out of same. The difficulty with integrated devices is not whether or not a transistor of a given size will switch, but making the lithographic process of printing the things on the die accurate enough that they can be made that size in the first place. Also last time I looked the transistors on a microprocessor were not suspended between gold electrodes.

Noise may be another issue, since now we must be talking about handfulls of electrons so that a small number of rogue noisy electrons could push the signal across the noise margin and flip the logic.

Alternatively with that size of device we could be designing with high redundancy rather than relying on accuracy - a whole new design paradigm could open up.