The Ultimate Scaling Limit – A Deterministic Single Atom Transistor

The end of Moore's law has been falsely predicted repeatedly
over the past 20 years, while Silicon technology has been driven
to seemingly unlimited miniaturization. One foundational limit
of size downscaling, however, will be hard to overcome "“ the
discreteness of the underlying atomic system. Let's assume cost
and manufacturability issues can be overcome: Can one reach
such atomic limits? Can one make wires that are say 4 atoms
wide and 1 atom tall and still provide Ohmic conductivity? Can
one connect such atomically thin wires to a single impurity
atom embedded in Silicon? If you can build such a thing, how
would you know that it is single impurity atom? What modeling
approaches are needed? How can such modeling software
be disseminated widely? This presentation will address these
questions through experimental and theoretical results of our
recently demonstrated "Single Atom Transistor" and overview
nanoHUB.org briefly.
Gerhard Klimeck is a Professor of Electrical and Commuter
Engineering at Purdue University. In the past 19 years at Texas
Instruments, NASA/JPL, and Purdue he has been the driving
force for the Nanoelectronic Modeling Tool Suite (NEMO).
He also leads nanoHUB.org (http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/
TEDxPurdueU-Gerhard-Klimeck-Con) as a director in the service
of nanoelectronic simulation and education on the web, serving
over 240,000 users. Gerhard is a fellow of the IEEE, the American
Physical Society, and the Institute of Physics.