Among conventional semiconductors, the size of transistor gates in integrated circuits has been limited by laws of physics to only 5 nanometers. Existing high-end gate transistors in the market are at 20 nanometers; and researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have made it possible for transistor to work with a 1-nanometer gate.
For scale, 1 nanometer is but a speck of dust, maybe even smaller – a strand of human hair is about 50,000 nanometers thick.
A schematic of the world’s tiniest transistor. Source: UC Berkeley
Ali Javey, lead principal investigator of the Electronic Materials program in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Science Division and faculty scientist at the same lab, shared that they have made the smallest transistor reported to date. He said, “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, there is a lot more room to shrink our electronics.”
Their technique involved using an engine lubricant commonly sold in auto parts shops called molybdenum disulfide, which is a material possessing great potential in LEDs, lasers, nanoscale transistors and solar cells. The lubricant was used together with carbon nanotubes
