Law-Defying Transistor Smashes Industry 'Limit', Measures Just 1nm (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Stack: U.S. researchers have unveiled the world's smallest transistor reported to date, combining a new mix of materials, which makes even the tiniest silicon-based transistor appear big in comparison. The team, led by the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, designed the minuscule transistor with a working one-nanometer gate -- far surpassing any industry expectation for reducing transistor sizes. In the scientific study, MoS2 transistors with 1-nanometer gate lengths, published today in the journal Science, the researchers describe a prototype device which uses a novel semiconductor material known as transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). The transistor structure uses a single-walled carbon nanotube as the gate electrode and molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) for the channel material, rather than silicon. "The semiconductor industry has long assumed that any gate below 5 nanometers wouldn't work, so anything below that was not even considered. This research shows that sub-5-nanometer gates should not be discounted. Industry has been squeezing every last bit of capability out of silicon. By changing the material from silicon to MoS2, we can make a transistor with a gate that is just 1 nanometer in length, and operate it like a switch," explained study lead Sujay Desai.

Comments

Wake me up...

[Anonymous Coward]

... when they actually have a working product. These lab projects don't quality as realizable, I remember the same promises were made about CPU's getting to 10+GHZ that never happened and CPU speeds hit a brick wall around 2006 because heat and leakage became too much which meant going much beyond 5Ghz became a pipe dream.

5nm Limits? Phooey

[TechyImmigrant]

This..
>The semiconductor industry has long assumed that any gate below 5 nanometers wouldn't work, so anything below that was not even considered.

This is simply false.

1nm Gate Size

[mentil]

1nm is the gate length, not the size of the entire transistor. Typically-quoted transistor sizes are actually the process nodes, which are half of the distance between the same feature in neighboring transistors, so they're not comparable to a measurement of an individual transistor. That said, I seem to recall a story from over 10 years ago, about someone creating a single 1nm transistor. The trick, now as then, is to use lithography to create billions of them connected to one another to form integrated circuits, and the main limitation in size reductions has been lithography tech rather than transistor tech.