BREAKTHROUGH! Quantum leap: World's smallest transistor built with just 7 atoms

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists have literally taken a leap into a new era of computing power by making the world's smallest precision-built transistor - a "quantum dot" of just seven atoms in a single silicon crystal. Despite its incredibly tiny size - a mere four billionths of a metre long - the quantum dot is a functioning electronic device, the world's first created deliberately by placing individual atoms.

It can be used to regulate and control electrical current flow like a commercial transistor but it represents a key step into a new age of atomic-scale miniaturisation and super-fast, super-powerful computers.

"The significance of this achievement is that we are not just moving atoms around or looking at them through a microscope," says co-author Professor Michelle Simmons, Director of the CQCT, an Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence. "We are manipulating individual atoms and placing them with atomic precision, in order to make a working electronic device.

"The Australian team has been able to fabricate an electronic device entirely out of crystalline silicon where we have replaced just seven individual silicon atoms with phosphorus atoms. That is amazing exactness.

"This is a huge technological achievement and it is a critical step to demonstrating that it is possible to build the ultimate computer - a quantum computer in silicon."

Continue reading - Quantum leap: World's smallest transistor built with just 7 atoms

Here we come, Singularity!