IBM creates tiniest transistor

Elinor Mills Abreu

SAN FRANCISCO: IBM Corp will announce on Monday the smallest ever working silicon transistor to serve as the nerve center in electronics ranging from televisions to PCs and cars. For the past 30 years the industry has been shrinking microprocessors -- the brains of computers -- and other chip components to put more function into smaller and smaller cell phones and other computing devices.

Transistors, basically the on-off switches that regulate the flow of electronic signals used for computing and other processes, are key parts of the chip. Reducing the size of the on-off switch in the transistor, known in the industry as gate length, boosts chip performance and speed, and lowers manufacturing cost and power consumption, IBM said.

The proof-of-concept transistor measures six nanometers -- about 20,000 times smaller than the width of a single human hair, according to IBM. That's at least 10 times smaller than transistors in use today, which range between 60 to 90 nanometers, said Meikei Leong, a researcher on the IBM project. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter.

"Each generation of such scaled devices has historically reduced the cost of doing some function by about 25 percent per year," said Juri Matisoo, vice president of technology for the Semiconductor Industry Association trade group.

"So what it means, basically, is that things are going to get a lot cheaper and that you'll be able to do things that aren't possible today, from a point of view of performance, such as language translation," Matisoo said. "You could conceive of cell phones that automatically translate from one language to another," he added.

However, it could be 10 years or more before the teeny transistors find their way into products on store shelves, Matisoo said. First, researchers must figure out how to handle the increased heat that is generated when more transistors are packed into a smaller area.

"You could pack 100 times as many of these transistors in the space of one of today's transistors," said Matisoo. "So, it's a big jump forward." As they get smaller, transistors also are more difficult to turn on and off, so IBM is working on complementary research into how to flip the switches faster, Leong said.

"This allows us to be ahead of the game" on boosting performance of chips, he said. "It opens up a new research area for us that wasn't possible in the past." The six-nanometer transistor IBM has developed functions in that it can switch on and off, but has not been proven to work in a device yet, according to Leong. IBM will present a paper on the research at the International Electron Devices Meeting being held this week in San Francisco.

© Reuters