CHINESE SCIENTISTS just made the world’s smallest, most energy-efficient transistor, with node chips less than 1nm (one nanometer) in size, Science reported.
Their new super-miniature memory device opens the path to ultra-high performance computing.
We can’t show you a picture of it, as 1nm is invisible to the human eye and even to standard optical microscopes.
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SOLVING CRUCIAL PROBLEMS
But physicists are more excited about the organization of the new node, rather than its size.
That’s because a number of scientists around the world have been working on 1nm nodes, in China, Japan and in the west.
But the main bottleneck in the process has been the problem of voltage. While the key element, known as the logic core, can be scaled down to very small sizes, scientists have not been able to shrink functioning transistors to sizes lower than the present five nanometer node technology, because of power supply issues.
Miniature transistors (known to scientists as Ferroelectric field-effect transistors, or FeFETs) have an operational voltage which is more than 1.5 V, which makes them a mismatch with the tiny logic cores.
The mismatch leads to power transition problems and latency – problematic delays in processing.
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FIXING THE MISMATCH PROBLEM
How to solve this problem? Qiu Chenguang and Peng Lianmao at the School of Electronics at Beijing University set out to find creative answers.
They eventually tried using metallic single-walled carbon nanotubes as gate electrodes. This shrunk the gate length of a molybdenum disulfide FeFET to 1 nanometer. More importantly, it resulted in a reduced operating voltage of 0.6 V, fixing the mismatch problem.
The new architecture worked perfectly.
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SMALLEST IN THE WORLD
In tests, the new transistors showed superior memory performance, with an extremely rapid programming speed of 1.6 nanoseconds (a nanosecond is one billionth of a second).
Also important was the fact that the device achieved an energy consumption which was extremely low, measured at 0.45 fJ/μm (femtojoules per micrometer).
This and the one nanometer gate length makes it “the smallest and most energy-efficient ferroelectric transistor reported globally”, said Trendforce, a science website, in a report published yesterday.
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MOTHER OF INVENTION
In 2022, the United States broke WTO rules by using coercion to stop companies worldwide selling high-grade chip-making equipment or advanced chips to China—despite the fact that much of it came from Taiwan, which is recognized in international law as part of China.
The Chinese responded by raising investment and working hard to develop their own alternatives.
While Nvidia hogs the market for high end semiconductors, China has a big industry producing standard level chips, and has developed a number of alternatives for high end processors.