joshbyard:

Researchers Create Working Transistor Out of Single Atom:

Researchers have created a working transistor out of a single phosphorus atom and in the process have shown that Moore’s Law, the cornerstone of the semiconductor industry, might hold true much longer than anyone expected.

To make their tiny transistor, the group, which was led by Michelle Simmons, a researcher at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, bathed silicon in phosphine gas. They then used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and a technique common in lithography to replace one silicon atom in a six-atom lattice with a phosphorus atom.

“Controlling a chemical reaction so that just one phosphorus atom was introduced into the device was challenging,” says Simmons.

When the team—which also included researchers from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information, Purdue University, and the universities of Sydney and Melbourne—applied a voltage across the phosphorus atom, it behaved like a transistor, switching and amplifying an electrical current.

(via A Single-Atom Transistor - IEEE Spectrum)