Aussie, Finnish Researchers Create a Single-Atom Transistor

ACKyushu writes "Researchers from Helsinki University of Technology (Finland), University of New South Wales (Australia), and University of Melbourne (Australia) have succeeded in building a working transistor whose active region comprises only a single phosphorus atom in silicon. The results have just been published in Nano Letters. The working principles of the device are based on sequential tunneling of single electrons between the phosphorus atom and the source and drain leads of the transistor. The tunneling can be suppressed or allowed by controlling the voltage on a nearby metal electrode with a width of a few tens of nanometers."

Comments

Stories like this make Jesus cry

[Ancient_Hacker]

This thingy is just a research device, just good for research. It's not a precursor of anything practical.

It's been known for many, many years that there are serious tradeoffs to be pondered when you shrink transistors (and FETs).

Your basic linear dimension versus surface area versus volume scaling laws are in full play here.

You win at first, as smaller base or gate lengths lead to more speed, and less surface area means less capacitance to charge up.

But below a certain size the rapidly shrinking cross-sectional area reaches its current-carrying capability, while noise and leakage loom large.

Right now the low-level chip designers, with their 10^12 atom transistors are already spending a large part of their time with these issues. The challenges are not going to go away, they just get larger as one attempts to shrink things even more. It's unlikely that these hard challenges can be overcome to span the million-million times distance to a true one-atom transistor.

  So don't put any big money on ever having one-atom transistors in any practical device.