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Physicists Create a Working Transistor From a Single Atom
stupendou writes "Australian and American physicists have built a working transistor from a single phosphorus atom embedded in a silicon crystal. The group of physicists, based at the University of New South Wales and Purdue University, said they had laid the groundwork for a futuristic quantum computer that might one day function in a nanoscale world and would be orders of magnitude smaller and quicker than today's silicon-based machines."
...it will slip between the fibers on your pocket, fall on the floor, get vacuumed up and get accidentally thrown away.
The future is here.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Good luck trying to mass manufacture those.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
This is getting old. Could you do something productive like talking about Area 51, Anal Probes by Aliens, or whether or not Han shot first?
Anything else please...
With transistors that small, how would you harden a microchip against radiation? Would the extra redundancy not make it worthwhile. That is to say, is there an optimal compromise between transistor size and resources consumed through redundancy allocation?
Life is not for the lazy.
How can they it's not really silicon based? I'm assuming that at least part of what gives the phosphorus its transistor like abilities is the fact that it's embedded in the silicon in the first place? Or am I missing something?
It's possible to envisage people complaining about their googleplex nand drive hitting the "atom" size limit in a few years time when moore's law "rice board puzzles" up the spec. "The hologram shooter is just not realistic unless you calculate the position and momentum of every single molecule." Impressive ...
The purpose of existence is to make money.
What's this going to do to their sales???
A bullet may have your name on it, but artillery is addressed to " Whom It May concern"
I hate being a nay-sayer, but the NYT article is making quite a spectacle about this whole thing. What the group has truly done is demonstrate a novel method for placing a single phosphorus atom within silicon and proceeded to measure the semiconducting properties of the resultant device with quite good precision. Because the doping is the result of a single atom, they can resolve more than just "on" and "off", and in fact can read three states from it, so it gets its quantum computing title.
As a materials scientist, I'm worried that they don't show any long-term data and all their results appear (from my not-so-thorough reading of the originating Nature Nanotechnology report) to be based on a single device. How repeatable is this result and how consistent are the signals across multiple devices? How far will the phosphorus atom diffuse over the lifetime of the device? Or even over the first few hours of its operation at room temperature? How closely can these devices be placed to each other on the silicon chip without getting cross-interference or depriving the dopant of its discrete quantum states? The dopants in a normal device aren't too terribly close to each other. And finally, how big must the surrounding structure be?
Don't get me wrong, this is excellent science and well deserving of its publication in such a prestigious journal, but the spectacle that the NYT is creating around this and the dreams of such a tiny device is a bit premature.
As someone who's been routinely getting "-1, Overrated" on many of my posts for about a year, I most say: Do shut up already.
In the time it takes to downmod someone, a few people have seen the opposing post, and likely agreed, or at least posted something in response that's likely to generate more interest in the original. With the high volume of traffic Slashdot gets, even 20 accounts isn't enough to obliterate any opinion to a reasonable degree. One particularly controversial post of mine managed to get every single moderation, before ending up at "+4, Interesting". I had over a dozen "flamebait", "troll", and "overrated" mods.
Mod gaming is a known problem. Slashdot's system is still above average in my opinion, and has the benefit of enough wide participation (and light enough consequences) that it doesn't matter. Sure, it's disheartening to see one of my deeply-thought-out statements misunderstood, but it's Slashdot. It's not like anything said here has a high probability of drastically changing the world.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I want steam based computing. Big things lots of spinning wheels and whistles.
Down with this mamby-pamby micro electronics.
They make a transistor from multiple atoms, all of them silicon but one, which is phosphorus. That is NOT a transistor made from a single atom (as the title suggests). Great advance, in any case, but misleading title.
First, some background: Most agree that Moore’s law, which has held firm, will meet its demise in a matter of decades. This will likely signal the end of the silicon era. The basic problem is the limitation of the ultraviolet process by which a hundred million or more transistors are etched onto increasingly smaller silicon wafers. But another problem is perhaps more daunting: When computing is reduced to smaller and smaller quantum scales (currently, the chip inside your computer can be 5 or so atoms across), one runs into the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle; it simply becomes impossible to tell exactly where an electron is, so there is leakage. In other words, using quantum computers, given contemporary materials and knowledge, 2+2 might eventually end up being 4, but there might need to be built in recursion and tautological algorithms. Computation using atoms has already been done, as pointed out by another poster. Think it will be a while before we see them at Best Buy. Also, it still seems like silicon based technology
That will seek out and replace missing, damaged and/or defective areas of the brain (stroke/accident) or even gradually replace the entire brain so seamlessly that the individual in completely unaware until they can be moved into an artificial body.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
We were making single atom transistors ten years ago, but it was hit or miss whether the atom would end up in the right place.
Today, we can place the atom with high precision, in silicon, so that the devices can be made reliably.
Ten years from now, who's to say we won't be able to mass produce them?
Wasn't aware of such progress. Do you have some citations I could examine? I'm aware we can "see" individual atoms using electron tunneling microscopy-and even manipulate them a bit. Thank you, very much
mass-produce the chillers required too?
Which will be the in and which the out and which the gate?
Electron in, Proton out and Neutron the control? Neutron in, Proton out and Electron gate? Proton in, Electron out and Neutron the gate?
Will we be able to switch them around for different applications?
E-P-N for algebraic computation, for example, N-P-E for reverse polish, maybe P-E-N for secure applications (or word-processing)?
And if these trans-atom transistors are installed in quantum applications, will there be E=NP problems?
If that's a joke, I'm not getting it.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Many dream of tiny nanobots that can swim the blood stream... but as the computers on board get faster and more powerful, there will come a day when one tiny little robot will say, to another tiny little robot, something like, "Do you really care if this clown gets eaten alive by cancer? I mean, what is it to us? We're smarter than he is anyway, shouldn't he be serving us rather than the other way around?"
Then the two tiny robots switch from hunting cancer cells to hunting Purkinje fibers.
Now the only problem is finding it.
Are you sure you left it on the bench before we went to the pub to celebrate, Bruce?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This would be useful if the supporting infrastructure wouldn't require a house full of hardware to determine the tri-state conditions.
This is getting old. Could you do something productive like talking about Area 51, Anal Probes by Aliens, or whether or not Han shot first?
Anything else please...
Han shot the Anal Probe first! And it happened in Area 51!
Ezekiel 23:20
Aren't 0201 SMDs tough enough to hand solder already?
Have gnu, will travel.
If that's a joke, I'm not getting it.
It's humour Jim, but not as we know it.