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."
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Well, at least this seems to set an ultimate limit to Moore's law, since it's not very easy to go to less than one atom per transistor.
Re:Moore's Law Extended? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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 t
Re:Moore's Law Extended? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Moore's law does not describe performance. [wikipedia.org]
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10GHz cores are not something you want to sit next to without proper shielding it's possible you could be burned. It was a concern back when we were approaching single core 5GHz before the dual core processors came out and everyone was speculating we would be at 10GHz in 3-5 years. That was about 6 years ago I believe.
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The devil is in the details. The "Active" region is only 1 atom wide, but the gate is still "10s of nanometers" Last I checked, the gate was still part of a transistor. We're currently mass producing with critical dimensions at 34 nanometers where I work.
Yeah, that's the first thing of thought of when I read the title. If I'm understanding correctly the gate is of dimension [1 atom x 10s of nm]. That's still damn impressive. I guess now the work has to come down to dropping that 10s of nm into the handful of atoms range.
Re:Moore's Law Extended? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, at least this seems to set an ultimate limit to Moore's law, since it's not very easy to go to less than one atom per transistor.
Yes, a single atom should be small enough for everyone.
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Well, at least this seems to set an ultimate limit to Moore's law, since it's not very easy to go to less than one atom per transistor.
Reckon it is time to start working on a Matrioshka brain [wikipedia.org] to ensure our future computing needs are covered.
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Um, you could still play with the wave function of a electron surrounding the atom. ^^
Or just go to single photons.
Re:Moore's Law Extended? (Score:5, Informative)
Notice that this discovery was NOT published in Nature. Wonder why? Here's why: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hendrik_Sch%C3%B6n [wikipedia.org] . Stay skeptical, wait for replication.
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Just because one researcher commits the "biggest fraud in physics in the last 50 years" that happens to involve transistors doesn't mean all such research is fradulent and there is no reason at all from your link to be more skeptical than normal about this research.
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"Just because one researcher commits the "biggest fraud in physics in the last 50 years" that happens to involve transistors doesn't mean all such research is fradulent and there is no reason at all from your link to be more skeptical than normal about this research."
Ahhh, a swing and miss, I felt the wind from that one though! I'm afraid that you (and the schizophrenic raving lunatic AC responding just before you) are making rather unwarranted assumptions about my comment. I never suggested "all such resea
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Perhaps you could also make a transistor out of nitrogen, which would be smaller than the phosphorus atom. Or maybe they'll discover a way to make a transistor out of sub-atomic particles and even have multiple transistors per atom.
Trademark already taken (Score:1, Funny)
Intel already has Atom processors.
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... and the Acorn Atom predates both.
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Overclocking (Score:1)
Re:Overclocking (Score:4, Funny)
Don't overheat those Phosphorous atoms....
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Perhaps I can reach over 9000 Ghz ...
over 9000?????
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That's impossible!!!
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Secunda the 160,000 barrels of oil a day after a coal into a liquid process.
African science is doing fine.
Re:hello, 100 years ago (Score:5, Informative)
Then how would you call a Field Effect Transistor?
No. A valve uses charge carriers (electrons) floating in a vacuum. A transistor uses either electrons or holes in a semiconducting solid as charge carriers. A semi-conducting solid is not as close as possible to a vacuum.
Re:hello, 100 years ago (Score:5, Informative)
Then how would you call a Field Effect Transistor?
Nice try with the bolding of F,E,T. Perhaps, with your use of "how" instead of "what", you are not native English, and don't understand the use of "sic". This is often used to denote a particular term/phrase/whatever which the writer considers incorrect, but which is being quoted nevertheless as-is. The fact that a FET is called a FET doesn't mean it is a transistor, any more than the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic, for the people, or a republic. You thus still call the DPRK the DPRK, as you call a FET a FET, because those happen to be the best-known names, but you don't call the DPRK a "democracy" and you don't call the FET a "transistor".
Now, the evidence, from the horses's mouth. Read the quote in the left hand column [pbs.org] by the guy who named the transistor. He named it so because it - "it" being the point contact transistor and devices descended from it, such as the modern BJT - had transfer resistance, the dual of the vacuum tube (or FET) which is defined in terms of its transfer conductance. Understand?
A semi-conducting solid is not as close as possible to a vacuum.
A substance comprising one atom is as close as possible to a substance comprising no atoms. My comment was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, designed to illustrate the danger of imprecision. In particular, the discovery is /not/ of a one-atom transistor, or even a one-atom FET, it's of a FET with a single atom channel. The other AC seemed to understand this.
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Mod parent up. mangu has completely missed the point, and so, apparently, have the moderators. A fet is more similar in principle/modelling/use within a circuit to a valve than the transistor, i.e. the BJT (before commercially viable FETs even existed). The only way a FET is more similar to a transistor is the nature of the charge carriers.
Specifically:
gate = gate
cathode = source
anode = drain
A depletion mode FET allows current to flow except when the reverse bias voltage between gate and source is such as t
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Wow, you really must be new here.
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Guess I was wrong
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I am an electronic engineer and am perfectly aware of the origin of the word "transistor".
I also happen to know that resistance and conductance are equivalent terms, resistance being the inverse of conductance. You can model vacuum tubes or transistors, both
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Egocentricity FAIL!
“sic’ is Latin, and known in pretty much every language with an European origin.
Next you tell me, that Edison invented the light bulb.
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The fact that a FET is called a FET doesn't mean it is a transistor, any more than the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic, for the people, or a republic.
Ah, you come from the school of redefinition, so you're trying to change the meaning of the word "transistor" to mean what will support your foolish argument. Yes, there are two types of transistor, each with different characteristics that orient towards particular applications (e.g., high-power for BJT, digital logic for FET) but to define only one of them as a "true" transistor just speaks of your ignorance. You must be a sound engineer?
Next up given how weak your argument is, you'll be raising your voice
Big Deal (Score:5, Funny)
We've had single Atom CPUs for some years now... :)
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"We've had single Atom CPUs for some years now... :)"
Now if we'd just stop electing the bastards...
Cosmic rays (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Cosmic rays (Score:5, Informative)
Mostly we don't send it into space.
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...or Denver.
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Mostly we don't send it into space.
NiceCCNP [expertcertify.com]
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I would think you either use the principles involved to make a slightly bigger, less sensitive transistor, or you run 10 or 20 of them in parallel and use the largest consensus.
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> So what do we do ?
We use error correcting codes.
Published in Nano Letters... (Score:2, Funny)
...Wouldn't that be kinda hard to read?
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stating the obvious (Score:1, Insightful)
Stories like this make Jesus cry (Score:4, Interesting)
This thingy is just a research device, just good for research. It's not a precursor of anything practical.
It's been known for many, many years that there are serious tradeoffs to be pondered when you shrink transistors (and FETs).
Your basic linear dimension versus surface area versus volume scaling laws are in full play here.
You win at first, as smaller base or gate lengths lead to more speed, and less surface area means less capacitance to charge up.
But below a certain size the rapidly shrinking cross-sectional area reaches its current-carrying capability, while noise and leakage loom large.
Right now the low-level chip designers, with their 10^12 atom transistors are already spending a large part of their time with these issues. The challenges are not going to go away, they just get larger as one attempts to shrink things even more. It's unlikely that these hard challenges can be overcome to span the million-million times distance to a true one-atom transistor.
So don't put any big money on ever having one-atom transistors in any practical device.
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This is without mentioning that the potential for this one-atom setup to have a severely reduced usable lifespan has to be through the roof. How much force can it really take to displace one damned atom? What happens when heat and time stress everything it's connected to?
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I'm old enough to remember when people said no dynamic memory chip could ever be made with more than 64 kilobits capacity. The capacitor charge would be flipped by radiation hitting the chip [wikipedia.org].
Probably this is the origin of the "640 kbytes should be enough for anybody" meme, since, with 64 kbit chips, it would be difficult to pack more than the 80 chips needed for 640 kbytes in a desktop computer.
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The 640k quote was relevant in 1981, when it seemed like a lot. It also was due to a limitation of the 8086 CPU's 20 bit address bus.Here's [si.edu] an excerpt from a 1993 interview where Gates clarifies his quote.
In real mode, the 8086 can only address 1 MB of RAM, out of which 384KB is reserved for video RAM. Hence the 640k restriction on memory (640=1024-384).
Using extended [wikipedia.org] and expanded [wikipedia.org] memory managers, it was possible for DOS programs on the 286 and higher CPUs to access memory beyond 1 MB by mapping it into pag
One more small step... (Score:1)
Apart from the implications this might have for classical electronics, the long-term goal here is to build solid-state quantum computing devices. The phosphorus donor has one lonely electron, and that electron's spin is a good candidate for a qubit. One of the good things about P in Si is the long decoherence times -- T2 times of almost one second have been demonstrated. The phosphorus' nuclear spin of 1/2 stays coherent for hours, if we can find a way to get at it.
Of course, the NIST guys with their ion tr
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million-million
Is that the retard way of saying “trillion”?
Or do you think we are retards?
Or did you just not want to remind us of Zooey Deschanel [google.com]? :P
I like to be reminded of her, you insensitive clod!
Oh well, the “Jesus” in the subject already gave it away anyway, who’s not right in his head. ^^
Ultimate Transistor... (Score:3, Funny)
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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
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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
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I believe scientists are at this very moment working on something called the "internet" which allows the transmission of messages and data across vast distances at the speed of light.
It could be huge.
tom (Score:2)
The active part is a single atom of Phosphorus ? While it might sound like you could get high density circuits with that, I hope they plan on using water cooling, given that phosphorus tends so spontaneously combust.
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FWIW, phosphorous will burn water. It pulls the oxygen away from the hydrogen. So in my high school chem lab it was stored under kerosene instead. Quite mind boggling at the time.
So if you're going to worry about spontaneous combustion, perhaps you should cool your computer with kerosene rather than water.
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This is not true. You can extinguish burning (white) phosphorus with water. Trouble is, after the water runs off it will self ignite again on contact with air above 30 degrees C.
Its this one allotrope out of many that is highly reactive, and single atoms embedded in silicon have hardly anything to do with the character of a bulk of the pure element.
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That is going to be a bitch to solder (Score:1)
Because SMDs aren't tedious enough already...
Does this remind you of homeopathy? (Score:1)
Which Font? (Score:2, Funny)
"The results have just been published in Nano Letters."
I'm guessing that'd be a Times New Roman 0.0000001 pt font then? Damn, I left my scanning electron reading glasses at home today.
Nano Letters (Score:1)