Smallest Transistor Ever, Working 1-nanometer gate created

Until the team at Berkeley Lab created their working transistor physics said a 5-nanometer gate was the threshold at which reduction would stop but using a "choice of proper materials" the team has proved that not to be the case.

"We made the smallest transistor reported to date," said Javey, lead principal investigator of the Electronic Materials program in Berkeley Lab's Materials Science Division. "The gate length is considered a defining dimension of the transistor. We demonstrated a 1-nanometer-gate transistor, showing that with the choice of proper materials, there is a lot more room to shrink our electronics."

The findings were published today in the journal Science. Other investigators on this paper include Jeff Bokor, a faculty senior scientist at Berkeley Lab and a professor at UC Berkeley; Chenming Hu, a professor at UC Berkeley; Moon Kim, a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas; and H.S. Philip Wong, a professor at Stanford University.

1-nanometer process chips will come but not yet , but at least they may be on the horizon.

"This work demonstrated the shortest transistor ever," said Javey, who is also a UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences. "However, it's a proof of concept. We have not yet packed these transistors onto a chip, and we haven't done this billions of times over. We also have not developed self-aligned fabrication schemes for reducing parasitic resistances in the device. But this work is important to show that we are no longer limited to a 5-nanometer gate for our transistors. Moore's Law can continue a while longer by proper engineering of the semiconductor material and device architecture."
newscenter.lbl.gov...

a reply to: gortex

Funny, I was just reading about this on Phys.org: Researchers use novel materials to build smallest transistor with 1-nanometer carbon nanotube gate.

Carbon nanotubes to the rescue! Pretty cool way to make a switch. You have to start somewhere. And there is no quantum tunneling so 1 nanometer it is! I like the quip, "Moore's Law can continue a while longer"!

S+F

originally posted by: TEOTWAWKIAIFF
a reply to: gortex

Funny, I was just reading about this on Phys.org: Researchers use novel materials to build smallest transistor with 1-nanometer carbon nanotube gate.

Carbon nanotubes to the rescue! Pretty cool way to make a switch. You have to start somewhere. And there is no quantum tunneling so 1 nanometer it is! I like the quip, "Moore's Law can continue a while longer"!

S+F

Then we will probably find a way to get transistors to be packed into the electron orbitals of atoms.

a reply to: stormcell

Eventually quantum computing will happen. Also optical computing. But this is really crazy news!

Think about it! Chop a millimeter into one million chunks and that is a nanometer! And they are already talking about packing a billion gates on a chip! The numbers are enormous! This is really a cool first step, proof of concept, look what the clever little monkeys figured out, news!

Pretty big accomplishment. Using the carbon nanotube as the gate terminal drops the gate capacitance drastically and allows for faster operation. The downside, of course, is in using MoS2 as the channel; it will increase the Rds(on) resistance for identical size channels. That's manageable in digital circuits and even low-power analog circuits, but could be a negative for power circuits.

Faster operation means that once the chip fabrication techniques are perfected, we can make much faster processors. I'm not going to say faster computers, because we're actually getting to the point where speed of electrical flow is a consideration on circuit boards.

TheRedneck

originally posted by: TEOTWAWKIAIFF
Think about it! Chop a millimeter into one million chunks and that is a nanometer!

What helps me more is knowing a human hair is about 100,000 nanometers thick, so, a nanometer is 1/100,000th of that, approximately.

There may be issues with trying to mass produce such transistors though, so I wouldn't count the chickens before they hatch.

Transistorized computing rules now - but the future is in Optical computing
that promises ultra-low power switches operating at the speed of light.
Seeing as how current state of the art supercomputers have a cycle time of
a picosecond or less, the next step is femtosecond, which equates to
1/millionth millionth of a second compared to a gate of 5 nm ( 5/1 billion).

From Wikipedia:

Optical or photonic computing uses photons produced by lasers or diodes
for computation. For decades, photons have promised to allow a higher
bandwidth than the electrons used in conventional computers.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

a reply to: Drawsoho

Yes. And guess what they are using to channel the light? Carbon nanotubes! See, CNTs can take electricity in one end and produce light out the other end. That too has been demonstrated.

Is it me or does it seem like some type of convergent point is coming? I almost believe one day we will wake up and there will be a general quantum computer. As this tech gets smaller you say, how small can hey go?? 1 nanometer is pretty small! Even if you need 5 nm for the Molybdenum Dioxide... that is still 1,000,000/6... uh, 200,000 switches in one millimeter of space! That is just linear, so 200K x 200K is still a huge number! And that is just napkin math! One square millimeter and 40 million switches. Wild!

[ETA: OK. I wont count my chickens yet! Still... were talking big numbers here!]

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Proof I am not a smart man:

"Molybdenum disulfide is the correct answer. We were looking for molybdenum disulfide. You have zero dollars. Pick a new category"

"I'll take short term memory loss for 800, Alex"