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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (54222)	10/17/2001 3:08:31 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Bell Labs claims breakthrough in molecular-scale transistor R&D Semiconductor Business News (10/17/01 14:51 p.m. EST) MURRAY HILL, N.J.--Scientists at Lucent Technologies Inc.'s Bell Laboratories today announced the creation of organic transistors with a single-molecule channel length. The develop promises to usher in a new class of high-speed, inexpensive carbon-based electronics, according to Bell Labs. With one molecule defining the physical dimension of a transistor's channel, the organic devices are more than a factor of 10 smaller than anything previously demonstrated with advanced lithography techniques, according to Bell Labs researchers. Many experts believe molecular-scale transistors will be an alternative to conventional ICs when silicon technology runs into physical limits and no longer supports device shrinks. In molecular-scale transistors, a single molecule performs switching and amplification of electrical signals. Lucent said Bell Labs scientists Hendrik Schon, Zhenan Bao and Hong Meng have now succeeded in fabricating molecular-scale transistors that rival conventional silicon transistors in performance. The team used a class of organic, carbon-based semiconductor material, known as thiols. "When we tested them, they behaved extremely well as both amplifiers and switches," said Schon, an experimental physicist who was the lead researcher. Using the tiny transistors, which are roughly a million times smaller than a grain of sand, the team built a voltage inverter, said Bell Labs. The prototype inverter circuit shows that molecular-scale transistors could be used in the future to build more complex ICs, such as memories or microprocessors, according to Bell Labs. Molecular-scale transistors would theoretically enable semiconductor maker to significantly increase the number of transistors on an IC by thousands of times compared to today's leading-edge chips, predicted the research lab. But the main challenge in making molecular-scale transistors has been the fabrication of electrodes that are only a few molecules, said Bell Labs. To overcome this barrier, Bell Labs researchers devised a "self-assembly" technique and design in which each electrode is shared by many transistors. "We solved the contact problem by letting one layer of organic molecules self-assemble on one electrode first, and then placing the second electrode above it," said Bao, who is an organic chemist. "For the self assembly, we simply make a solution of the organic semiconductor, pour it on the base, and the molecules do the work of finding the electrodes and attaching themselves." Bell Labs said the chemical self-assembly technique is relatively easy and inexpensive, but is key to reducing the transistor's channel length. The channel length of the experimental transistors is between one and two nanometers (billionths of a meter), an order of magnitude smaller than any transistor channel created before, the laboratory said. A report on the breakthrough appears in the Oct. 18 issue of Nature, a scientific journal.