Related to our notes that maybe 7nm CPUs and GPUs represent "the end" of progress for "silicon" transistors.

Quote:
Smallest. Transistor. Ever.

Berkeley Lab-led research breaks major barrier in transistor size by creating gate only 1 nanometer long

...the laws of physics had set a 5-nanometer threshold on the size of transistor gates among conventional semiconductors..

Some laws are made to be broken, or at least challenged..

..The key was to use carbon nanotubes and molybdenum disulfide (MoS2)...


Note: They did NOT use silicon. So, maybe 7nm (maybe slightly smaller) remains the smallest we'll see from silicon.

In the mean time, long term, people will try to find a way to get smaller than that -- by using materials other than Silicon. Thing is, these other materials are harder to work with -- so, only time will tell if they will be successful -- its not obvious they will be successful (in my career we worked with other circuit materials -- that looked good in simple applications but had unsolvable fabrication problems when trying to make a complex CPU type part).

Along those lines, to quote more from the article:

Quote:
...it’s a proof of concept. We have not yet packed these transistors onto a chip, and we haven’t done this billions of times over. We also have not developed self-aligned fabrication schemes for reducing parasitic resistances in the device...


Still, for a "Materials Scientist/Engineering Scientist" (or similarly trained), solving this intractable problem is what life is all about -- its fun smile


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