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."
Re:Mod manipulation by GreatBunzinni, aka Rui Maci (Score:2, Insightful)
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...
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.
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.
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.
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