John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain at Bell Labs, 1948. They won a Nobel Prize in physics for their invention: the transistor.
Can a transistor be the size of an atom? And if so, how will this affect our lives? The answers are coming!
The transistor, invented in the 1950s, is a fundamental building block of modern electronic devices. It is a device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and power. Every transistor is made up of a semiconductor material with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor’s terminals changes the current flowing through another pair of terminals. Because the controlled (output) power can be much more than the controlling (input) power, a transistor can amplify a signal.
Transistors have found several main uses in the electronics industry. First, transistors can use a small signal applied between one pair of its terminals to control a much larger signal at another pair of terminals. This property is called gain. A transistor can control its output in proportion to the input signal; that is, it can act as an amplifier. Alternatively, the transistor can be used to turn current on or off in a circuit as an electrically controlled switch, where the amount of current is determined by other circuit elements. Thus transistors can turn things on and off, amplify, and have fine control of signals. These are all important properties needed for intelligent communication.
Today physicists have taken a first early step toward escaping the limits of a technological principle called Moore’s Law by creating a working transistor using a single phosphorus atom. That is right, a transistor the size of a single atom. The possibilities of miniaturization and computational power are mind boggling.
The atom was etched into a silicon bed with “gates” to control electrical flow and metallic contacts to apply voltage, researchers reported in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. It is the first such device to be precisely positioned using a repeatable technology, they said, and may one day help ease the way toward creation of a so-called quantum computer that would be significantly smaller and faster than existing technology.
This means that we are on the threshold of everyone having a supercomputer on his ring, or in a dot on your ring. Maybe this seems a bit of an exaggeration, but as the physics is better understood, and the technology matures, this kind of science fiction becomes closer and closer to reality. This is not the first time such a small transistor has been made, but the first time it has been made on demand. In other words, physicists are beginning to understand this misty quantum realm well enough to have it do our bidding.
Moore’s law states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every 18 months to two years, and it’s predicted to reach its limit with existing technology in 2020. Cutting the size of a transistor to a single atom may defeat that concept.
The rise of the machines has been so rapid that a supercomputer of the 1990s is something that a desktop user today has within reach. And the growth in processing power, depends on transistors. The smaller the transistor, the more than can be packed in to a small space, the less power needed, and so on. Smaller structures also communicate faster, because signals do not need to travel as far. Thus, with increasing computer power comes decreasing cost! Breaking Moore’s law means that the constant acceleration of computing power is not enough. An accelerating rate of improvement may be seen in our lifetimes.
“We really decided 10 years ago to start this program to try and make single-atom devices as fast as we could, and beat that law,” said Michelle Simmons, director of ARC Center for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the University of New South Wales, Australia. “So here we are in 2012, and we’ve made a single-atom transistor roughly 8 to 10 years ahead of where the industry is going to be.”
This is wonderful news as it means that the cost of technology will continue to drop, placing it within reach of the poor, allowing them to enjoy benefits reserved formerly only for the wealthy elite. In addition, the tendency of computer technology is to take control from gatekeepers (today the media is superseded by the internet), and limit the ability of politicians to control the medium of communication. This is all for the good. But back to the cold reality.
There is a limitation to the latest finding: The atom must be kept at minus-391 degrees Fahrenheit to keep it from migrating out of its channel, the report said. Because of this, the result should be seen as a proof of principle rather than an initial step in a manufacturing process, the researchers said.
No surprise here. We have tantalizing results on the cutting edge of physics. It shows that single-atom devices can in principle be built and controlled with atomically thin wires, where the active component represents the ultimate physical limit of Moore’s Law.
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