Aussie, Finnish Researchers Create a Single-Atom Transistor 96
ACKyushu writes "Researchers from Helsinki University of Technology (Finland), University of New South Wales (Australia), and University of Melbourne (Australia) have succeeded in building a working transistor whose active region comprises only a single phosphorus atom in silicon. The results have just been published in Nano Letters. The working principles of the device are based on sequential tunneling of single electrons between the phosphorus atom and the source and drain leads of the transistor. The tunneling can be suppressed or allowed by controlling the voltage on a nearby metal electrode with a width of a few tens of nanometers."
Re:Moore's Law Extended? (Score:5, Insightful)
stating the obvious (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Moore's Law Extended? (Score:3, Insightful)
That kind of technology being moved into the semiconductor industry for mass reproduction and economies of scale is still a long ways out and I personally think Moore's law will lose steam before then.
I would say it's pretty much lost steam already. If you take a function that can't exploit multiple cores, then the single core performance has not improved much in a while. More cores is a "cheat" that extends it somewhat but I doubt 10+ cores makes any sense for end users so it won't scale much further than it already has.
The other bummer is power, even though there's a massive focus on power savings now running a CPU/GPU at 100% draws more and more power. The latest AMD offering, the HD 5950 is bumping the head into the 300W ATX limit, and most agree it's designed to overclock for more. Or it is perhaps the same bummer, since it's the main reason 10GHz+ cores aren't practical.
Fortunately, I think there'll be a lot of innovation in other areas, particularly in networking (fiber, 4G mobile broadband), storage (SSD) and form factor (think iPhone, Wii controller, OLED displays and whatnot).
Re:Different universities cooperating (Score:1, Insightful)
They wanted to attempt a project that none could do alone so they emailed each other and collaborated perhaps? It is very common for Australian researchers to collaborate with scientists from other countries, I don't know why exactly, probably because it makes sense? How did this discussion get off the ground, for all we know the other is in Finland, yet we have a common ground in wanting to explain this?
Really, I'm just astounded by your question, can you give me a good reason why they wouldn't collaborate?
Re:Different universities cooperating (Score:3, Insightful)
A real story from me was when I was at university and introduced a friend of mine(doign a PhD in microbiology) to USENET... this guy had never used or really heard of the Internet as it was quite new(and I am old