Posted on 07/27/2015 6:18:41 AM PDT by Citizen Zed
The heart of a processor inside a computer and other devices is the transistor. The more transistors that can be crammed inside a CPU, the better the device performs. There is a limit to how small a working transistor can be and a group of researchers has made a significant breakthrough in transistor size. The team was able to show for the first item that a single molecule can operate as a field-effect transistor.
The transistor that the team developed works when the single molecule is surrounded by charged atoms that operate as the gate. The results of the research will be published in the August 2015 issue of Nature Physics. Researchers working on the project hail from Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik (PDI) in Berlin, Free University of Berlin (FUB), the NTT Basic Research Laboratories (NTT-BRL) in Japan, and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C.
To perform this feat, the researchers used techniques that IBM pioneered in 1990 when researchers created the letters I, B, and M by moving single atoms on a metal surface.
(Excerpt) Read more at slashgear.com ...
Well, I guess that’s the end of Moore’s Law.
Unless they figure out how to make transistors out of a single quark.
Smaller molecules will be researched next....!
"Living organisms are controlled by a single molecule - DNA. Yet the study of physics tells us that the behaviour of single molecules is also controlled by the laws of quantum mechanics. The implications of this for biology have not been fully thought through."
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0006551289/quantumevolution/202-6775530-9928622
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"The form and dynamics of every living organism on this planet is controlled by a single molecule of DNA. Recent experiments suggest that size alone is not a bar to quantum behaviour. A group based in Vienna have recently fired fullerene molecules through the double slit experiment and demonstrated that these particles have no problem in sailing through both slits simultaneously. And fullerene is big - 60 carbon atoms in a cage-like structure, the famous 'buckyball' molecule - with a diameter similar to that of the DNA double helix. If fullerene can enter the quantum multiverse then the microscopic constituents of our own cells, including DNA, are in there as well." --Johnjoe McFadden
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/qe/Biography.htm
Bump
If fets can be built by manipulating molecules then imagine extremely powerful CPU’s the size of red blood cells...or even whole nano factories built the size of cells getting their power from static charges from the human body itself. The tech changes everything if fets can be built that small....imagine nano sized “warships” recognizing bad cancers and destroying them from within...programmable molecular sized fets would be at the heart of it all as other components can be downsized. Repair factories for severe trauma victims could be injected via a 5 cc syringes, repatching systems while reporting vitals data back to a computer. In 50 years medicine will have completely changed! The molecule sized transistor will make nanotech a viable reality....oil spills...gone...pollution cleaned up! God has given us the tools to make a better world, but without him in our hearts...the tools will be ignored or used for great evil instead!
I wonder how much heat it generates. Doesn’t do much good if your CPU melts in a few nanoseconds!
Interesting, but I wouldn’t get too excited just yet.
“The researchers admit that these experiments are far from finding applications in real-world items. Much of the physics involved in making the transistors work aren’t fully understood.”
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