Physicists Create a Working Transistor From a Single Atom 127
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."
Finally, a computer so small... (Score:5, Funny)
...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.
Re:Finally, a computer so small... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Finally, a computer so small... (Score:5, Funny)
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if(!Cell->IsCancerous)
{
Cell->kill;
}
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Mental note: Always include a unit test for "test subject did not die".
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It compiles and passes all the unit tests, so it should ;)
Then comes the good old "eat your own dog food before you sell it" phase...
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Food = new SoylentGreen(Cell)
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People already lose 17" laptops. This will be no different.
If you make the minimum size something like a cell phone it will just be that much more powerful.
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A PitrPod Zepto?
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Only in the universe instance without cats.
A transistor made of a single atom? (Score:2, Funny)
Good luck trying to mass manufacture those.
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Didn't they say the same thing about reducing die sizes to the nanometre scale?
Re:A transistor made of a single atom? (Score:4, Interesting)
The process size is virtually a straight line on a log10 scale. Going on the last 40 years we'll be at 1nm by 2030. Its an order of magnitude every 10 - 15 years
Re:A transistor made of a single atom? (Score:4, Insightful)
That was my point - back then creating working dies at 22 nm, which is as good as we can do right now really, would have been laughed at by some. "That's only 100 or so atoms! Good luck!"
The team doing this has demonstrated that they can be much more accurate with single atom placement than in the past, so I don't doubt we'll be building at the single atom scale in mass production eventually, and probably within my lifetime easily.
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Re:A transistor made of a single atom? (Score:4, Insightful)
>Subatomic
No. The limit is a single atom. Not unless someone comes up with a way of making a transistor out of free quarks. We'd have to have some sort of breakthrough in physics to do that and that's not even on the horizon yet.
-theoretical ---we are not even here yet.
-empirical
-demo devices
-prototype devices
-production/commercial devices
--
BMO
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I thought going beyond the limit of a single atom was the purpose behind Quantum computing?
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It should be interesting to see what happens in the next few years. SInce following the trend now leads to subatomic 200pm process sizes in 20 years or so. Apparently the current lithography technology has limits around 10nm.
I'm not going to get behind the line on this one; I always seem to get lazy, and then lose out. Not this time, by gods! I'm placing my hold on "The Young Man's Illustrated Primer" at the library right now!
Re:A transistor made of a single atom? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:A transistor made of a single atom? (Score:5, Informative)
Today, we can place the atom with high precision, in silicon, so that the devices can be made reliably.
Cornell demonstrated a single atom transistor [eetimes.com] nearly 10 years ago, and today we are still pretty much at the level of demonstrating / playing / investigating.
Ten years from now, who's to say we won't be able to mass produce them?
It is a pretty big jump from building a single demonstration / proof of concept device and connecting it and integrating it into a design that works reliably at speed. IBM seems to be getting some interesting results with a single atom DRAM [eetimes.com], but that is still way closer to a laboratory curiosity than an option for shipping silicon.
But that is just the Fab side of things. To actually design and build chips with this sort of technology is almost certainly going to require some serious upgrades to EDA tools.
Re:A transistor made of a single atom? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's what I said... that we've been able to build these things for ten years. As the article explains, the big difference here is the precision of the placement of the atom, making the devices much more manufacturable (though not on a mass-scale, of course).
And yes, there are other steps involved in making actual devices. But we don't have to work in a single pipeline. As the process engineers get closer to making this sort of thing mass producible, the software engineers will be simultaneously upgrading the EDA tools, and the design engineers will be thinking of ways to use this new device. It'll go into high price, low yielding devices at first. Probably military tech, or cutting edge instruments for physicists. Those pilot projects will be used to the design tools, tune the process, and maximize the yield.
It'll be quite some time before they reach consumer electronics, if they ever do, but I wouldn't toss them aside as non-manufacturable.
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That's what I said... that we've been able to build these things for ten years.
Yes, and this is what you didn't say: and today we are still pretty much at the level of demonstrating / playing / investigating.
Did you lose interest after getting to the end of what you wrote?
Did you read how they did it?
Today, we can place the atom with high precision," (Score:1)
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
-196? (Score:2)
mass-produce the chillers required too?
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Spot on.
Re:A transistor made of a single atom? (Score:4, Funny)
Ten years from now, who's to say we won't be able to mass produce them?
A little known fact about Moores law. People usually don't know this, but Moores law is actually an inverted bell curve, so a few years from now, circuits will actually start to grow bigger and bigger every year. In the future we will have computers as big as mt to perform the simplest tasks. Unfortunately the bottom of this bell curve occurs at the same time as the end of the Mayan calendar, so not to many people will be around to worry about it.
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You aren't into nanotech, are you?
Massive nano-scale manufacturing is much closer to reality than you seem to assume. Look into it. No spoon on hand for me to spoonfeed right now, sorry.
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You aren't into nanotech, are you?
Massive nano-scale manufacturing is much closer to reality than you seem to assume. Look into it. No spoon on hand for me to spoonfeed right now, sorry.
Did you read how they did it?
Does that seem like a scalable process to you? Here is what the article says:
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yuTM_EOtHY [youtube.com]
http://www.sme.org/metv/ [sme.org]
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MEMs devices [youtube.com], in contrast to nanoscale devices, are having a huge real world impact today and have been for some time. Nanomaterials are having an impact. Nanodevices... it looks to me like lots of laboratory work, lots of interesting projects, some fantastic demonstrations, but not much being manufactured or shipping as product.
As for the single atom transistor - interesting demonstration that is necessary for the development of future devices, but not even close to being manufacturable on any real scale.
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The key, and what is happening now, is that the tools are being made. Once the tools are made, the rest is a matter of development. Don't be doubtful. Time moves faster than your expectations.
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If that's a joke, I'm not getting it.
It's humour Jim, but not as we know it.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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You can always count on Bit [wikia.com] to give you a straight answer. Yes siree Bob!
Re:Radiation hardening (Score:4, Interesting)
Do you need to? Are normal computers radiation hardened? I realize there are situations that do use that, like satellites, but they are always behind the curve technology wise due to the extra requirements for a harsh environment, so no problem with this, they could use more classic lithography.
Also you could just encase the chip/board/unit/whatever in something to resist radiation. I'm not saying that is a workable solution in all cases, but in many it would be just fine. Just shield the chip and call it good.
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Re:Radiation hardening (Score:4, Informative)
Are normal computers radiation hardened?
Yes. They are hardened against the normal background radiation that is ubiquitous. That's why there's more-or-less a minimum amount of energy that's required to change a single storage bit, otherwise it gets flipped too easily by a stray alpha decay from the chip's packaging. We entered the era where packaging is made from low-radiation materials some time ago to help with this, but it only helps, since existenace here on Earth is bathed in a certain level of radiation.
That isn't to say normal chips are hardened against abnormal levels of radiation, but they most certainly are designed with a given level of anticipated background.
Re:Radiation hardening (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Radiation hardening (Score:5, Interesting)
Normal computers aren't radiation hardened, but the point is that they store and process information based on more than just the quantum state of a single particle. It takes a great deal more unwanted energy to cause them to flip to the undesired state. This kind of thing would many times more vulnerable to stray radiation, heat or stray electromagnetic fields than the smallest conventional transistor.
But any practical computer is going to have to contain millions of these things. If you want to carry out a computation with such a machine, either you have to protect it with conditions that have a minimal chance of causing a computational error or you will have to engineer it with redundancy and error correction mechanisms that may in the end be bigger and less reliable than a classical solution.
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With transistors that small, how would you harden a microchip against radiation?
Simple. Side effect of the whole equipment required to keep it in cryogenic conditions.
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Back to room sized computers :).
If its embedded in a silicon crystal.... (Score:2)
Re:If its embedded in a silicon crystal.... (Score:4, Informative)
Pretty much - that's how transistors work. The phosphorous has a extra electron (compared to the silicon) and the combination forms an extrinsic semiconductor, which you then use to make junctions and transistors and diodes etc.
Just having the phosphorus atom isolated doesn't do much for you, so I think the article is referring to "silicon based computers of today" without really thinking about it properly - you still need to dope it to make it useful for making computer chips, despite it already being an intrinsic semiconductor.
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Maybe they the whole thing?
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The Raspberry Pi? (Score:2, Offtopic)
What's this going to do to their sales???
Re:The Raspberry Pi? (Score:4, Funny)
They're stopping at 22/7 sales.
I told them they were being irrational, but there's no stopping them.
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Um, yeah, rdr^2.
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Yes, but some humour is required to interpret the joke.
I could have written 3.14159 units, but that is also rational. If I'd written Pi in that line, the joke doesn't work.
Also, you forgot to log in.
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Relax cupcake, it was A JOKE.
Goodness me.
(also, for the record, not that it matters, I'm a scientist. I am well aware that 22/7 is a rational number, as is any representation of Pi that write down (short of the actual symbol itself, or the definition in words). I didn't think it was necessary to qualify that I knew that fact for a simple wordplay joke on the name of the company and a common shorthand representation of that number.
I'm surprised you didn't take offence at my suggestion that they only sell a n
Not to nay-say, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not to nay-say, but... (Score:4, Informative)
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Congratulations, whether it will be used for QC or not (which is what is think, but i worked for some time on a competing kind of quantum bit), its a cool thing, and for sure it is a big step forward which will IMHO influence many devices.
As somebody having worked on QC i personally find every newspaper report mentioning QC having a certain hype. Usually they make it sound like: "This device will go into a working QC" instead of "this device enables to examine physics never examined before".
Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Too small (Score:5, Funny)
I want steam based computing. Big things lots of spinning wheels and whistles. Down with this mamby-pamby micro electronics.
Just be careful with overclocking.
Transistor made from multiple atoms (Score:3, Informative)
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In this respect this story is similar to the one with 'Tetris in 140 bytes' (except for external libraries, etc.).
Look, I've built a car from a single atom! It is embedded into a small cavity in the bodywork of a volkswagen.
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Exactly what I was thinking. To say the the article is lacking in detail is an understatment. All transistors have 3 parts: base, emitter, collector (or source, gate, and drain with FETs, etc). Clearly, this cannot be accomplished with ONE ATOM.
Also, transistors don't store anything (as in binary 1 for on (charged) and 0 for off (discharged)). That would be a capacitor. Transistors can be used to charge or discharge capacitors, but they do not store energy.
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Also, transistors don't store anything
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory#Principles_of_operation [wikipedia.org] would appear to disagree with you.
Heisenberg says "NO" (Score:3, Interesting)
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2+2 might eventually end up being 4
In other words, they are trying to build a computer for postmodern/liberal types Thanks, but no, thanks, I'll stay with my conservative/rationalist Turing-machine-based computer.
Injectable nano machines.. (Score:2)
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.
OK, I'll Byte... (Score:2, Funny)
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?
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Injectable robots? (Score:1)
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.
Ob (Score:2)
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?
Support hardware (Score:2)
This would be useful if the supporting infrastructure wouldn't require a house full of hardware to determine the tri-state conditions.
Damn! (Score:2)
Aren't 0201 SMDs tough enough to hand solder already?
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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...
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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!
Re:Mod manipulation by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Maci (Score:5, Insightful)
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.