Ellen Phiddian
Cosmos science journalist
A team of Korean researchers has built a transistor smaller than a nanometre.
The researchers have figured out how to grow metallic materials 0.4 nanometres in width, and a few tens of micrometres in length, which they have then incorporated into tiny transistors.
They’ve published their findings in Nature Nanotechnology.
Transistors are a crucial component of all computing technology. The smaller its transistors, the faster and more powerful a computer can be.
Traditional computer chips are becoming increasingly difficult to improve by shrinking. This has spurred research into semiconductors that can be used as transistors at even smaller sizes.
These researchers were able to grow a tiny crystal made of molybdenum disulphide into a specific shape. It was “epitaxial” growth: that is, the growth of a crystal in one specific orientation.
This yielded a “one-dimensional” metallic material – micrometres long, but less than a nanometre, or a billionth of a metre, wide.
They used this to build their tiny transistor.
“The 1D metallic phase achieved through epitaxial growth is a new material process that can be applied to ultra-miniaturized semiconductor processes,” says senior author Moon-Ho Jo, director of the Center for Van der Waals Quantum Solids at the South Korean Institute for Basic Science.
“It is expected to become a key technology for developing various low-power, high-performance electronic devices in the future.”
