Communications of the ACM
Smallest. Transistor. Ever.
A research team has created a transistor with a working 1-nanometer gate (in comparison, a strand of human hair is about 50,000 nanometers thick).
Credit: Qingxiao Wang/University of Texas at Dallas
A research team at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has created a transistor with a working 1-nanometer gate.
The team, which included researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Texas at Dallas, and Stanford University, used molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) for the semiconductor material. Because electrons flowing through MoS2 are heavier, their flow can be controlled with smaller gate lengths, according to the researchers. MoS2 also can be scaled down to atomically thin sheets, about 0.65 nanometers thick, with a lower dielectric constant.
To construct the gate, the researchers used carbon nanotubes, hollow cylindrical tubes with diameters as small as 1 nanometer. The team then measured the electrical properties of the devices to demonstrate the MoS2 transistor with the carbon nanotube gate effectively controlled the flow of electrons.
"The semiconductor industry has long assumed that any gate below 5 nanometers wouldn't work, so anything below that was not even considered," says Berkeley researcher Sujay Desai. "This research shows that sub-5-nanometer gates should not be discounted. Industry has been squeezing every last bit of capability out of silicon."
From Berkeley Lab News Center
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