Once again, researchers have come up with a new way to fan the flames of Moore's Law. As Alexis over at Wired Science reports, a team of British scientists have unveiled the world's smallest transistor. This diminutive little guy is one atom thick and measures about ten atoms across. That's about three times smaller than the 32-nanometer transistors that currently represent the cutting edge of silicon-based electronics, and a far cry from the first transistor developed by Bell Labs back in 1947 (pictured right). The discovery also happens to give chipmakers a little more wiggle room before they come face-to-face with the cold, hard laws of physics.
The key to this transistor shrinky dinking is a material known as graphene. Discovered by the same team of researchers who developed this transistor, graphene is liken to atomic-scale chicken wire and, most importantly, has the ability to retain conductivity even at one atom thicknesses.
The other attractive aspect of graphene transistors is that they can be made using the virtually the same semiconductor fabrication technology chipmakers use today.
Then there's the timing of this announcement. Not even a month ago, Suman Datta, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University, gave a hard deadline for silicon's remaining usefulness as principal ingredient in microchips, saying that silicon chips have no more than four years of further miniaturization left. After that point, chipmakers will need to look elsewhere for their electronic-circuitry needs.
From the looks of it, graphene may be the answer.
Aside: To give you a better idea of the sizes we're talking about here, the original Bell Labs transistor could be held in your hand. Today, you can fit hundreds of Intel's 45nm transistors on the surface of a single red blood cell. There are about 410 million transistors on each dual core chip, and 820 million for each quad core chip.
