

Seven atom transistor sets the pace for future PCs - ukdm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/10146704.stm

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RiderOfGiraffes
The takeaway quotation for me:

    
    
        On chips where components are 22 nanometres in
        size, transistor gates are about 42 atoms across.

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binarymax
Curious as to how will they solve current leakage on something this small?
Interesting nonetheless.

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nazgulnarsil
this and heat are the main issues, not shrinking the transistors AFAIK.

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jacquesm
The masks uses to produce this stuff are works of art, they take in to account
the distortion and interference of the waves used for the exposure.

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snissn
But not at the single atom level, tunneling becomes a much much bigger problem
-- it's definitely exponential.

the bbc article doesn't say, but my guess is that it has to be super cooled to
work. Which makes a lot of sense actually considering that this group says
that on the bigger picture they're working on Quantum Computing, which
generally is only done in the laboratory at temperatures pushing our ability
to cool things down near abs zero.

So these guys probably don't care that to actually use this set of atoms as a
transistor, you may have to be really cold, or even use a really low clock
cycle, because their bigger goal is to create a quantum computer, which would
be soo powerful for certain things that having to query it at a very low
frequency, and have it be in the lab are OK things

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hugh3
I've tracked down the paper and you're right -- all measurements are done at a
temperature of 20 mK.

