Researchers at the University of Berkeley in California developed the world’s smallest transistor, it was announced yesterday, a breakthrough that could make chips of the future much smaller and cheaper. The scientists say that chips using their design could hold 400 times more transistors than current chips of the same size.
Details of the invention, dubbed ‘FinFET’, will be unveiled next month at the International Electronic Devices Meeting in Washington. The research work was funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency.
To achieve the size breakthrough, the Berkeley team changed the design of the transistor ‘gate’ that controls the flow of electric current in the device. In standard designs, the gate is a flat conductor which controls only one side of the passage through which the current flows, but the researchers have redesigned it as a prong that straddles both sides of the passage. This reduces current leakage, meaning the transistor can be made much smaller. The FinFET’s gate is 18 nanometers long, or about the width of 100 atoms. This is around 10 times smaller than the standard transistor gates, and the research team hope to reduce the gate size further.
