Boffins eschew silicon to build tiniest-ever transistor, just 1nm long Boffins from the United States Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and beyond say they've cracked a new way to make very, very, small transistors. As explained in their Science paper MoS2 transistors with 1-nanometer gate lengths, the authors explain silicon is a lovely substance with …
Not only grease, but an excellent additive to engine and gearbox oil too! Back in the day when I used to race karts (2-stroke engines), our team used to use moly based oil, when our rivals all used castor based. We were the only team that regularly got through a whole season without having an engine seize at some point....
Still use it in my 45 year old classic car, which is running as well as it did when new.
I wonder if the chips made with it will last as well.......
It's an additive to grease, not a grease itself, of course. Quite interesting how it works. The MoS2 (residue) continues to lubricate if the bearing overheats or runs dry, much as graphite does, but better: It binds chemically to the steel's surfaces, making the steel itself slippery. Particularly valuable in high speed/pressure joints as a result.
They're not talking about the actual mass, they're talking about the "effective mass". Wikipedia has an article on it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_mass_(solid-state_physics)
but I admit I haven't read it to see how good it is
Without bothering to look into anything I read "heavy" as quaint dialect for "tightly held" - an allusion to the crystal's field's affinity for hanging on to the wee bastards - and therefore how difficult it is for them to pop out.
Just a guess though ;)
Silicon is number 2. Molybdenum is 54... sayeth Wiki. 2th most abundant in oceans.
Largest producers: The world's production of molybdenum was 250,000 tonnes in 2011, the largest producers being China (94,000 t), United States (64,000 t), Chile (38,000 t), Peru (18,000 t) and Mexico (12,000 t). The total reserves are estimated at 10 million tonnes, and are mostly concentrated in China (4.3 Mt), US (2.7 Mt) and Chile (1.2 Mt). By continent, 93% of world molybdenum production is about evenly shared between North America, South America (mainly in Chile), and China. Europe and the rest of Asia (mostly Armenia, Russia, Iran and Mongolia) produce the remainder.
How much silicon is used in semiconductor production? How much molybdenum is used in other applications? If the silicon substrate makes up 95% of the mass of a future semiconductor, what impact will the 5% of the semiconductor that is molybdenum have on the market?
And finally, if the use and value of molybdenum goes up, will new reserves be found or become economically viable, as we see in many other minerals?
Quite. I fancy you could fashion quite a large 0.65nm thick sheet from just a single day's ~1,000,000kg production.
The stuff's used massively in industry e.g for lubricating and hardening steel so I can't imagine a tiny trickle being diverted off into semiconductors will/would ever be noticed by the market.
Shirley if the electrons are heavier then they travel slower (ISTR that was how it worked when I was doing chips) so even if the gate length is shorter the device is not going to scale up faster linearly.
At these scale they should be thinking more on cathode gride anode sorts of thingys using the tunneling.
Bring back Baby!
Upvoted for what I assume is an SSEM reference.
There was quite a lot of work being done on tunnelling triodes at one point (for EMP hardening) but it all went very quiet - so I assume it was successful but very classified, or unsuccessful as the sheer gate count of modern semiconductors rendered it impractical.
In order to make the transistor so small, they had to use a material with lower electron mobility. When there were news items about the experimental world's fastest transistor, materials like Indium Antimonide were used, which had a very high electron mobility.
If we made computers with 1nm transistors instead of 20nm transistors, but they ran at 500 MHz instead of 2 GHz, I don't think very many people would be interested. So that, not the fact that it's just a prototype, and they're not ready to make a Molybdenum Disulphide microprocessor just yet, would seem to be the killer.
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