Towards the ultimate transistor

Abstract

The first transistor, made more than 60 years ago at Bell Labs, was a couple of inches across. Today, a typical laptop computer uses a processor chip that contains well over a billion transistors, each one with electrodes separated by less than 50 nm of silicon, which is less than a thousandth of the diameter of a human hair. This continual drive for miniaturization, with the density of transistors doubling roughly every two years, was first noted by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, and has been such a mainstay of electronics development that it is now enshrined as “Moore's law”. These billions of transistors are made by “top down” methods that involve depositing thin layers of materials, patterning nano-scale stencils and effectively carving away the unwanted bits. The incredible success of this approach is almost impossible to overstate. The end result is billions of individual components on a single chip, essentially all working perfectly and continuously for years on end. No other manufactured technology comes remotely close in reliability or cost-per-widget.