A research team from the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have created a transistor with a working 1-nm gate, which gave them bragging rights for the smallest transistor ever.

While earlier transistors pretty much peaked at 5nm, those researches at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, also known as the Berkeley Lab, have managed to drop that down to 1-nm by using some high-end materials which game them a lot more room.

According to a blog post, this was achieved by using carbon nanotubes and molybdenum disulfide (MoS2). While carbon nanotubes have been around for while with IBM describing them as the next big thing in the post-silicon future, molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) is the new thing allowing researches to come up with the "shortest transistor ever with 1nm nanotubes.

While still being just a "proof of concept" it also show that transistors are no longer limited to a 5nm gate showing that "Moore's Law can continue a while longer by proper engineering of the semiconductor material and device architecture".

TSMC is already putting a lot of R&D resources into 3nm process development so we are still far away from 1nm but at least we do know that it will be possible.



Source: LBL.GOV.