Seven atom transistor sets the pace for future PCs. 24 May 2010Last updated at 12:01 Prof Simmons and her colleagues have swapped silicon atoms for phosphorus Researchers have shown off a transistor made from just seven atoms that could be used to create smaller, more powerful computers.
Transistors are tiny switches used as the building blocks of silicon chips. If the new atomic transistor can be made in large numbers it could mean chips with components up to 100 times smaller than on existing processors. Single-atom transistor discovered. 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 composes only of a single phosphorus atom in silicon.
The results have just been published in Nano Letters, a journal of the American Chemical Society. 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. The rapid development of computers, which created the present information society, has been mainly based on the reduction of the size of transistors. Access : Quantum optics: Single-atom transistor for light : Nature. Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense.