Changing The Transistor Rules?

Today's Pentium chips pack as many as 42 million transistors under their covers, and Moore's Law (that transistor density doubles every 18 months) continues to predict years of evolutionary, exponential growth. But suppose someone came up with a different kind of transistor -- one dramatically smaller than predicted by Moore's Law?

Suppose it came from Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, and it was called a "single-electron tunneling transistor"? Suppose it could operate at room temperature? Suppose this new type of transistor was "three magnitudes of order smaller than the gigabit limit for MOS [metal oxide semiconductors]"?

Indeed, that's what they've created: a transistor made up of three, 3-nanometer-wide (3 billionths of a meter) wires, clustered around a capacitor made up of 500 atoms of silver, all sitting on a graphite substrate. It uses one single electron on the "gate" lead to control current through the rest of the transistor (hence, it's a "switch"). According to Masakazu Aono in the March 7 EE Times (http://www.eet.com/story/OEG20010306S0061),

"We can make an atomic switch in a cluster of silver atoms. The island [the area in the center of the transistor] is so small we are talking about a one-electron effect circuit."

We're not going to delve into the physics of this discovery here (you can find some in the EE Times article), but it is fascinating to consider the scale at which this work is being done. And if it pans out, it has incredible implications for computing's future: They talk about "single-molecule-wide" wires, and of using scanning tunneling microscopes tipped with a "single tungsten atom" "to punch a .3-nanometer pit in the silicon substrate to create the capacitor well." And then into that well, they insert 500 silver atoms. Aono expects that his team will be soon be "recreating the birth of semiconductor integration, but on a nanometer scale."

At this scale, storing a terabyte of information on a single chip is well within the realm of possibility!

Of course, this particular work may never leave the lab -- there's many a potential slip between the laboratory's cup and the consumer's lip. But just look at what's being done here -- scientists are dealing directly with molecules and atoms, pushing them around to do their bidding. This is the promise, and the future, of "nanotechnology," which I expect will "change the rules" in much the same way that transistors and integrated circuits did in our past.

We are not at the end of our electronics journey -- in fact, it's only just begun!

Don't Blink!

This is an excerpt from the "Rapidly Changing Face of Computing, " a free weekly multimedia technology journal written by Jeffrey R. Harrow, Principal Member of Technical Staff for the Corporate Strategy group at Compaq. A more extensive version of this discussion, as well as others around the innovations and trends of contemporary computing and the technologies that drive them, are available at http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc . Jeff's opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Compaq. The RCFoC is a service of, and Copyright 2000, Compaq Computer Corp."