Scientists Create First Functional Molecular Transistor

Dananajaya Ramanayake sends along this excerpt from Wired: "Nearly 62 years after researchers at Bell Labs demonstrated the first functional transistor, scientists say they have made another major breakthrough. Researchers showed the first functional transistor made from a single molecule. The transistor, which has a benzene molecule attached to gold contacts, could behave just like a silicon transistor. The molecule's different energy states can be manipulated by varying the voltage applied to it through the contacts. And by manipulating the energy states, researchers were able to control the current passing through it."

Comments

I'll take a mole

[Anonymous Coward]

or two, if the price is right. ;~) However, right now, it smells like vaporware.

Re:I'll take a mole

[Bigjeff5]

However, right now, it smells like vaporware.

I hate to break it to you, but it could only be "vaporware" if they had actually announced a product.

This is what is commonly referred to as "scientific research". It will, in and of itself, never produce a product. However, what WILL happen is Bell Labs begins working on turning this accomplishment into a manufacturable product. As was noted in the article, this is probably still a decade or more away from reality.

When Bell scientists produced the first vacuum tube transistor in 1947, they didn't suddenly have super-computers in 1948. It took years of developement after that initial breakthrough to produce computers at a realistic price (millions of dollars at the time for less computing power than a $2 calculator).

The same thing will happen here, and in a decade or two our world will yet again be unrecognizeable from what it is today.

Re:I'll take a mole

[Bigjeff5]

*Facepalm*

Another question

[elashish14]

How stable is it? This would drastically lower the costs of production and effectively approach the size limit of a transistor, but for something that they purport to use in supercomputing applications, they'll have to find a way to make it last a long time. That's the hurdle that's preventing most organic devices (LEDs, PVs, TFTs).

Long way to go here.

Feature Size

[rtaylor]

This would make a feature size of about 0.3nm?

Re:Feature Size

[TheKidWho]

.3nm would be about 13 generations from now if they keep scaling down transistors at 2^.5, which would be at least 20+ years from now in everyday usage.

Re:Feature Size

[assemblerex]

I even hear it runs duke nukem forever.

From TFA:

[JoshuaZ]

"The transistor, which has a benzene molecule attached to gold contacts, could behave just like a silicon transistor." It isn't clear how large the transistor as a whole is. A benzene molecule is pretty small with only 12 atoms. That presumably isn't the entire transistor. Whether they mean benzene attached to something else isn't clear from the article. However, given that prior small transistors are on the order of 10s of atoms thick at minimum, this seems like a major improvement. It looks like Moore's law will live for a bit longer yet.

Re:Benzene?

[nedlohs]

I don't think you can call a single molecule a liquid in order for it to be said to evaporate.

Observation of molecular orbital gating

[handy_vandal]

See also Observation of molecular orbital gating.

Re:Definitely interesting, but I am asking myself.

[Bigjeff5]

1) Current manufacturing process are struggling to get transistors any smaller than millions of molecules each, and Benzine, the molecule specifically used here, is not very big.

2) Any manufactured product using this discovery is yet to be invented. Such a product is still a decade or two away. In other words, nothing other than the existance of a molecular transister is a reality, and everything else is a possibility. Duh. "Interesting Possibilities" drive science, it's mostly what these guys look for. They leave actually producing things with their discoveries to engineers.

Not the first!

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems remarkably similar to what other researchers have already done:

03 Dec 2009
"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 composes only of a single phosphorus atom in silicon. The results have just been published in Nano Letters."

http://www.tkk.fi/en/current_affairs/news/view/yhden_atomin_transistori_loydetty/

Misleading, as expected

[Anonymous Coward]

For anyone interested in the actual paper, it's H. Song, et al., Nature 462 p. 1039-1043

As a (biased) researcher in the field, my opinion of this is that it is no more than an attention grab and will do little to advance science (this is pretty typical of Nature papers, though):

1. The contacts are still very large compared to the channel (what they call the "transistor"). Without advances in scaling down contacts, you won't see a meaningful decrease in transistor density from this technology. What's more, they don't include an actual picture of the device, so there's no way to tell how big the contacts actually are.

2. Like most researchers, they "cheat" and use a very large (probably macroscopic) back gate to modulate current. The idea of a field effect transistor is that you apply a voltage perpendicular to the direction of current, which causes charges to move along the electric field and either hinder or help transistor current by creating (or eliminating) a potential well in the transistor. In real devices, you have billions of these transistors on a single wafer and so at some point you have to actually place a local gate, which usually has a huge negative effect on transistor operation.

3. They don't appear to have any good way of controlling how many of their transistors work (they rely on chance to get these molecules to bridge the gap between electrodes)

While certainly thought-provoking, as an engineer I am not particularly impressed until I see them using scalable methods.

Re:Definitely interesting, but I am asking myself.

[Tesla Tank]

1) Current manufacturing process are struggling to get transistors any smaller than millions of molecules each, and Benzine, the molecule specifically used here, is not very big.

The current state of the art manufacturing process is at 32nm, which is much less than millions of molecules each. 32nm is 320 angstrom, so we're at roughly 300 molecules size.

Pin configuration?

[Stele]

I assume once they add the Acetone and Turpentine, we'll end up with a DIP package?