Things will get a lot faster in about 12 years.
That's when computers and other digital devices will reap the rewards of Bell Laboratories' latest transistor advance. The research arm of Lucent Technologies published a report this week outlining its newest world record, a transistor that is four times smaller, five times faster, and draws 60 to 160 times less power than today's similar devices.
While Bell Labs and others - most recently Toshiba in Japan - have built small transistors in the past, this latest advance in nanotechnology is the most promising new technology for building the kind of power-integrated circuits that boast many billions of transistors on a single silicon chip, as opposed to today's chips, which pack mere millions of transistors together.
"All the development work in processing technology, applications, circuit applications, reliability - all of that research will now have to come out of making devices like this," says Steve Hillenius, department head at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey.
While the achievement is an engineering milestone, many other advances must come together before this new transistor - which is only 182 atoms wide and boasts an insulation layer that is only three layers of atoms thick - appears in commercially available devices.
"You have to build the infrastructure that will print these - the manufacturing lines, many billions of dollars of development and equipment - before it goes into production," Hillenius says.
Bell Labs brought together scientists from several disciplines to break the transistor record, including researchers in the fields of material deposition, etching, advanced scanning, and device simulation. While companies sometimes hype world-record-breaking technology for its own sake, this advance from Bell Labs stands out as significant, says Ken Galloway, dean of Vanderbilt University's School of Engineering.
"Certainly for me the importance of this is the capability it might add to building large integrated circuits with low power consumption. I've not seen anyone build it this small, and quite honestly I didn't think you could build something this small. A lot of people have demonstrated pieces of the technology, but very few people have put together the whole thing," says Galloway. "The next question they are going to have to answer is, 'How manufacturable is it? How reliable will it be?'" The answers to these questions, however, are still several years out, says Galloway.
The fall of the transistor record is significant for another, non-technical reason.
In recent years, large corporate labs have moved away from basic research, preferring to concentrate their resources on developing technology that can help their corporate parents' bottom line. Advances such as Bell Labs' work with transistors, Galloway says, reflect the evolving direction of resources, away from research in basic physics and toward engineering research. "They're not doing astrophysics and that sort of thing, but good engineering work is still going on at places like Lucent and Bell Labs," he says.
Twenty-nine scientists authored the Bell Labs' paper on the transistor advance, and the team plans to unveil the technical details on 8 December at the International Electron Devices Meeting in Washington, DC.
