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

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.