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A team of scientists headed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researcher Prof. Ali Javey has used carbon nanotubes and a compound called molybdenum disulfide to create a transistor with a working 1-nm (nanometer) gate, thus setting the new world record for the smallest transistor.
"The semiconductor industry has long assumed that any gate below 5 nm wouldn't work, so anything below that was not even considered," said Sujay Desai, the lead author on the study and a graduate student in Prof. Javey's lab.
"We made the smallest transistor reported to date," Prof. Javey said.
"The gate length is considered a defining dimension of the transistor. We demonstrated a 1-nm-gate transistor, showing that with the choice of proper materials, there is a lot more room to shrink our electronics," he added.
"By changing the material from silicon to molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), we can make a transistor with a gate that is just 1 nm in length, and operate it like a switch."
Molybdenum disulfide can also be scaled down to atomically thin sheets, about 0.65 nm thick, with a lower dielectric constant, a measure reflecting the ability of a material to store energy in an electric field.
Making a 1-nm structure, it turns out, is no small feat. Conventional lithography techniques don't work well at that scale, so the team turned to carbon nanotubes, hollow cylindrical tubes with diameters as small as 1 nm.
NOTE
Turning these nanotube transistors into a processor would require billions of the switches to be reliably created on a single chip. That may be possible, but it could also be cripplingly expensive.
http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/20...cally-thin-material-smallest-transistor-ever/
"The semiconductor industry has long assumed that any gate below 5 nm wouldn't work, so anything below that was not even considered," said Sujay Desai, the lead author on the study and a graduate student in Prof. Javey's lab.
"We made the smallest transistor reported to date," Prof. Javey said.
"The gate length is considered a defining dimension of the transistor. We demonstrated a 1-nm-gate transistor, showing that with the choice of proper materials, there is a lot more room to shrink our electronics," he added.
"By changing the material from silicon to molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), we can make a transistor with a gate that is just 1 nm in length, and operate it like a switch."
Molybdenum disulfide can also be scaled down to atomically thin sheets, about 0.65 nm thick, with a lower dielectric constant, a measure reflecting the ability of a material to store energy in an electric field.
Making a 1-nm structure, it turns out, is no small feat. Conventional lithography techniques don't work well at that scale, so the team turned to carbon nanotubes, hollow cylindrical tubes with diameters as small as 1 nm.
NOTE
Turning these nanotube transistors into a processor would require billions of the switches to be reliably created on a single chip. That may be possible, but it could also be cripplingly expensive.
http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/20...cally-thin-material-smallest-transistor-ever/