![]() "This means we can't turn off the transistors," said Desai. But below that length, a quantum mechanical phenomenon called tunneling kicks in, and the gate barrier is no longer able to keep the electrons from barging through from the source to the drain terminals. That is a boon when the gate is 5 nanometers or longer. Current flows from the source to the drain, and that flow is controlled by the gate, which switches on and off in response to the voltage applied.īoth silicon and MoS2 have a crystalline lattice structure, but electrons flowing through silicon are lighter and encounter less resistance compared with MoS2. Transistors consist of three terminals: a source, a drain, and a gate. The red-shaded regions form the electrical leads to a single phosphorus atom in the center. By changing the material from silicon to MoS2, we can make a transistor with a gate that is just 1 nanometer in length, and operate it like a switch."Ī scanning tunneling microscope image of a hydrogenated silicon surface shows a 3-D perspective of a single-atom transistor. Industry has been squeezing every last bit of capability out of silicon. "This research shows that sub-5-nanometer gates should not be discounted. ![]() "The semiconductor industry has long assumed that any gate below 5 nanometers wouldn't work, so anything below that was not even considered," said study lead author Sujay Desai, a graduate student in Javey's lab. The development could be key to keeping alive Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's prediction that the density of transistors on integrated circuits would double every two years, enabling the increased performance of our laptops, mobile phones, televisions, and other electronics. Philip Wong, a professor at Stanford University. Other investigators on this paper include Jeff Bokor, a faculty senior scientist at Berkeley Lab and a professor at UC Berkeley Chenming Hu, a professor at UC Berkeley Moon Kim, a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas and H.S. The findings were published in the journal Science. MoS2 is part of a family of materials with immense potential for applications in LEDs, lasers, nanoscale transistors, solar cells, and more. ![]() The key was to use carbon nanotubes and molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), an engine lubricant commonly sold in auto parts shops. ![]() We demonstrated a 1-nanometer-gate transistor, showing that with the choice of proper materials, there is a lot more room to shrink our electronics." "The gate length is considered a defining dimension of the transistor. "We made the smallest transistor reported to date," said Javey, lead principal investigator of the Electronic Materials program in Berkeley Lab's Materials Science Division. For comparison, a strand of human hair is about 50,000 nanometers thick. Some laws are made to be broken, or at least challenged.Ī research team led by faculty scientist Ali Javey at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has done just that by creating a transistor with a working 1-nanometer gate. They knew that the laws of physics had set a 5-nanometer threshold on the size of transistor gates among conventional semiconductors, about one-quarter the size of high-end 20-nanometer-gate transistors now on the market. Schematic of a transistor with a molybdenum disulfide channel and 1-nanometer carbon nanotube gate.įor more than a decade, engineers have been eyeing the finish line in the race to shrink the size of components in integrated circuits. Now, a team of researchers has succeeded in creating a transistor with a working 1-nanometer gate. ![]() Research breaks major barrier in transistor size by creating gate only 1 nanometer long.Įngineers have been eyeing the finish line in the race to shrink the size of components in integrated circuits. ![]()
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