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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."
The devil is in the details. The "Active" region is only 1 atom wide, but the gate is still "10s of nanometers" Last I checked, the gate was still part of a transistor. We're currently mass producing with critical dimensions at 34 nanometers where I work. Granted, this is sweet, knowing that a transistor's active region can be that small. Still, the limit will really be placed on reproducibility. I mean, placing a single phos atom in the middle of a silicon chip at just the right location? That kind of technology being moved into the semiconductor industry for mass reproduction and economies of scale is still a long ways out and I personally think Moore's law will lose steam before then.
We've had single Atom CPUs for some years now... :)
Well, at least this seems to set an ultimate limit to Moore's law, since it's not very easy to go to less than one atom per transistor.
Yes, a single atom should be small enough for everyone.
Mostly we don't send it into space.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Notice that this discovery was NOT published in Nature. Wonder why? Here's why: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hendrik_Sch%C3%B6n . Stay skeptical, wait for replication.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Then how would you call a Field Effect Transistor?
No. A valve uses charge carriers (electrons) floating in a vacuum. A transistor uses either electrons or holes in a semiconducting solid as charge carriers. A semi-conducting solid is not as close as possible to a vacuum.
Then how would you call a Field Effect Transistor?
Nice try with the bolding of F,E,T. Perhaps, with your use of "how" instead of "what", you are not native English, and don't understand the use of "sic". This is often used to denote a particular term/phrase/whatever which the writer considers incorrect, but which is being quoted nevertheless as-is. The fact that a FET is called a FET doesn't mean it is a transistor, any more than the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic, for the people, or a republic. You thus still call the DPRK the DPRK, as you call a FET a FET, because those happen to be the best-known names, but you don't call the DPRK a "democracy" and you don't call the FET a "transistor".
Now, the evidence, from the horses's mouth. Read the quote in the left hand column by the guy who named the transistor. He named it so because it - "it" being the point contact transistor and devices descended from it, such as the modern BJT - had transfer resistance, the dual of the vacuum tube (or FET) which is defined in terms of its transfer conductance. Understand?
A semi-conducting solid is not as close as possible to a vacuum.
A substance comprising one atom is as close as possible to a substance comprising no atoms. My comment was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, designed to illustrate the danger of imprecision. In particular, the discovery is /not/ of a one-atom transistor, or even a one-atom FET, it's of a FET with a single atom channel. The other AC seemed to understand this.
I would say it's pretty much lost steam already. If you take a function that can't exploit multiple cores, then the single core performance has not improved much in a while.
Moore's law does not describe performance.