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Oct 13, 2016

Berkeley Lab announces first transistor with a working 1-nanometer gate

Posted by in categories: computing, nanotechnology, quantum physics

Breaks through the 5-nanometer quantum tunneling threshold; may allow for Moore’s law to continue…


Schematic of a transistor with molybdenum disulfide semiconductor and 1-nanometer carbon nanotube gate. (credit: Sujay Desai/Berkeley Lab)

The first transistor with a working 1-nanometer (nm) gate has been created by a team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientists. Until now, a transistor gate size less than 5 nanometers has been considered impossible because of quantum tunneling effects. (One nanometer is the diameter of a glucose molecule.)

The breakthrough was achieved by creating a 2D (flat) semiconductor field-effect transistor using molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) instead of silicon and a 1D single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) as a gate electrode, instead of various metals. (SWCNTs are hollow cylindrical tubes with diameters as small as 1 nanometer.)

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