NEC Develops World's Smallest Transistor

TECH SPACE

By 2020 rather than combining racks of cheap Linux boxes to make one big supercomputer - the individual boxes will be as powerful as today's most powerful supercomputers

Tokyo (AFP) - Dec 09, 2003
Japan's computer giant NEC Corp. has developed the world's smallest transistor in a breakthrough which could lead to the production of a supercomputer the size of a desktop PC, a report said.

The newly developed transistor is only 1/18th the size of the most common transistor now in mass production, the Asahi Shimbun said, quoting company sources.

With the new technology, a typical semiconductor chip measuring one square centimeter (0.16 square inches) would be able to hold 40 billion transistors, about 150 times the current number.

The technology would cut the size of huge supercomputers, which are capable of making 600 billion calculations a second, to a similar bulk as ordinary desktop computers, the newspaper said.

NEC researchers are to announce the development at the International Electron Devices Meeting to be held in Washington from Monday.

Production technology still needs to be developed before the transistor can be mass-produced. NEC expects to market the transistor in about 2020, the daily said.

TECH SPACE

Molecular Memories, Once Doubted, Prove Durable and Practical

Riverside - Dec 03, 2003
In the ongoing quest to create computing devices that are both incredibly small and incredibly powerful, scientists � envisioning a future beyond the limits of traditional semiconductors � have been working to use molecules for information storage and processing.

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