Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp claims to have developed an ultrafast transistor with features only 13 atoms or 5 nanons – a nanon is a millionth of a micron – wide, and switching speed six times faster than the previous fastest High Electron Mobility Transistor – but only when you cool the thing to minus 258.5`, and it would need to work at rather higher temperatures before it could be applied in practice: NTT says the transistor would enable the creation of devices that could cram the processing power of a supercomputer into a laptop, but the phone company wants it for application in more advanced amplifiers for receiving radio waves from satellites and other objects in Outer Space; Tokyo University professor Tatau Nishinaga described the NTT transistor as excellent and said that it was created by combining existing crystal growth processes with NTT’s advanced semiconductor fabrication techniques.
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