Working Transistor Made with Atomic Precision
Physicists at Australia's University of New South Wales created this working transistor consisting of a single atom placed precisely in a silicon crystal. The tiny electronic device uses as its active component an individual phosphorus atom patterned between atomic-scale electrodes and electrostatic control gates. This level of atomic accuracy could yield the elementary building block for a future quantum computer with unparalleled computational efficiency. The microscopic device has tiny visible markers etched onto its surface so researchers can connect metal contacts and apply a voltage.
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Transcript
00:00:10 this represents the world's first single atom transistor made with absolutely perfect precision it's the work of researchers that Australia's University of New South Wales and it demonstrates all the potential for being the building block of a super-fast quantum computer a device that will solve some of our grandest technological challenges the thing that's unique about the work that
00:00:35 we've done is that we have with atomic precision position this individual atom within our device single atom devices aren't new but the ones developed so far have a margin of error of around 10 nanometers a tiny spatial shift but enough to affect their overall functionality so this individual position is really important if you want to use it as a future quantum bit or
00:00:59 qubit because it turns out that if you want to have control precise control at this level you need to position the individual atoms with atomic precision with respect to control gates and electrodes and so several groups have tried this and indeed they've been able to isolate a single atom in their device but really if you want to make a practical computer in the long term you
00:01:21 need to be able to put lots of individual atoms in and there you find that the separation between the atoms is quite critical so you need to have atomic precision to do that and so that you can also bring electrodes in to address each of those individual atoms so this is kind of the key step making that first individual atom device but in a technique that would allow you to
00:01:38 scale it up to put lots of single item devices in towards making essentially a a full scale computer in the long term the beauty of the UNSW device is that it's encased in silicon a thoroughly researched material commonly used by industry it opens up the possibilities for future manufacturing anybody that deals with silicon quantum computation would be hard-pressed to go past
00:02:01 Australian publications at this so with Michelle's group over the last year's or last five years I'd say definitely has established itself as a world leader in that field it's predicted that transistors will need to reach the single atom level by 2020 to keep pace with Moore's law a trend that sees the number of transistors squeezed onto a circuit double every 18 months to
00:02:23 two years so we really decided 10 years ago to start this program to try and make single item devices you know as fast as we could and try and beat that law so here we are I guess what 2012 and we've made a single item transistor roughly about you know eight to ten years ahead of where industry is going to be [Music]