![]() Materials like graphene and carbon nanotubes might be vital to making transistors even smaller thanks to their physical properties, but getting from there to building functional devices will take a while. More specifically, we can't make transistor gates-which control the flow of current from the source to the drain-much smaller than 5 nm because of something called quantum tunneling that prevents them from working as intended. The main reason is that we are quickly approaching the physical limits of what's possible with existing materials and the most advanced manufacturing processes we have. Ever since the first integrated circuits in the 1950s, the rate of progress in miniaturizing transistors has followed Moore's Law, which predicted the density of active components in integrated chips would double every two years.Īs many of our readers know, progress in this direction has slowed down significantly in recent years. Chipmakers are burning the midnight oil to miniaturize transistor designs, and a team of researchers in China have created what is believed to be the smallest one yet.įor several decades, scientists and engineers have been shrinking transistors to the point where their tiniest features are only comprised of tens of atoms. "We have found a way to use that microscope not simply to observe or manipulate atoms but to purposefully build with atomic precision a device with just seven atoms and it works in a real environment.Why it matters: Moore's Law has been on life support for a while now, but it's not dead yet. "Well, what seemed remote then is now a reality," Professor Simmons says. They ended their paper in the journal Nature with a comment that 'the possibilities for perhaps the ultimate in device miniaturization are evident', but added several notes of caution and concluded tentatively that 'the prospect of atomic-scale logic circuits and other devices is a little less remote'. They used a scanning tunnelling microscope to place 35 xenon atoms individually on a nickel surface to write the letters 'IBM'. It is 20 years since the world's smallest logo was made by Don Eigler and Erhard Schweizer at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, Professor Simmons notes. The CQCT team is now making devices with features about 10 times smaller at 4 nanometres. This new device demonstrates that the technologies to enable fabrication and measurement at the atomic scale have begun to arrive.Īt present, the length of a commercial transistor gate - which allows the transistor to act as an amplifier or switch for an electrical current - is about 40 nanometres (billionths of a metre). The team's primary goal is to create a quantum computer in silicon - an area where Australia has a unique collection of researchers and an international lead. ![]() We have shown that this process can continue." ![]() For 50 years, this process of miniaturization has been fundamental in driving productivity growth across the global economy. This is highly significant not just for computer buffs but for all Australians. "Now we have just demonstrated the world's first electronic device in silicon systematically created on the scale of individual atoms. Today you can carry a computer around in your hand and many of its components are more than 1000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. It took up an entire room and you could hold its components in your hands. "Australia's first computer was commissioned in 1949. ![]() "We are testing the limits of how small an electronic device can be," Professor Simmons says. But until now nobody has been able to use it to make atomic-precision devices capable of processing electronic inputs from the macroscopic world. The technology for placing individual atoms on a surface, the scanning tunnelling microscope, has existed for two decades. "This is a huge technological achievement and it is a critical step to demonstrating that it is possible to build the ultimate computer - a quantum computer in silicon." "The Australian team has been able to fabricate an electronic device entirely out of crystalline silicon where we have replaced just seven individual silicon atoms with phosphorus atoms. "We are manipulating individual atoms and placing them with atomic precision, in order to make a working electronic device. "The significance of this achievement is that we are not just moving atoms around or looking at them through a microscope," says co-author Professor Michelle Simmons, Director of the CQCT, an Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence. ![]() The discovery is reported today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology by a team from the UNSW Centre for Quantum Computer Technology (CQCT) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It can be used to regulate and control electrical current flow like a commercial transistor but it represents a key step into a new age of atomic-scale miniaturisation and super-fast, super-powerful computers. ![]()
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