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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."
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.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I'm wondering about the transconductance. What is 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 they releasee some more data on how this device can perform, don't get too excited....
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
But ten years from now, Windows XP 2012 Service Pack 9 will run at least 5 percent faster.
What it means is that America has the most advanced technology in the world. The socialist, europeans are too busy hanging out in cafes and working 20 hour work weeks to do anything technologically signifigant.