Engineers built world’s smallest transistor is 1nm long read more at here www.spinonews.com/index.php/item/1179-engineers-built-world-s-smallest-transistor-is-1nm-long

Transistor sizing is an important part of improving computer technology. The smaller your transistors, the more you can fit on a chip, and the faster and more efficient your processor can be.

Now, a team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has successfully built a functional 1 nanometer long transistor gate, which the lab claims are smallest working transistor ever made.

For years, the computing industry has been governed by Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors in a semiconductor circuit doubles every two years. The Current generation technology uses 14nm scale technology, with 10nm semiconductors anticipated to release in 2017 or 2018 with products like Intel’s Cannon lake line.

Javey, lead principal investigator of the Electronic Materials program in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Science Division, said, we made the smallest transistor reported to date. The gate length is considered a defining dimension of the transistor. We demonstrated a 1-nanometer-gate transistor, showing that with the choice of proper materials.

Companies like Intel had originally announced that they would be exploring other materials for producing 7nm semiconductors and beyond, the Berkeley Lab research team has beaten them to the punch, using carbon nanotubes and molybdenum di sulfide (MoS2) to create a sub–7nm transistor.

The MoS2 functions as the semiconductor, with the hollow carbon nanotube functioning as the gate to control the flow of electrons. At 14nm, a single die has over a billion transistors on it, and the team has yet to develop a viable method to mass produce the new 1nm transistors or even developed a chip using them.

But, the results here are still important that new materials can continue to allow smaller transistor sizes, and with it increased power and efficiency for the computers of the future.