Research breaks a major barrier in transistor size by creating a gate only 1 nanometer long in 2025. For many decades, engineers have been eyeing the finish line in the race to shrink the size of components in the world of IC. As we know, the laws of physics had set a 5-nanometer threshold on the size of transistor gates among conventional semiconductors, about one-quarter the size of high-end 20-nanometer-gate transistors now on the market.
We always heard records always break, so this happened in the world of electronics. A research team led by faculty scientist Ali Jawi at Berkeley Laboratory has done just that by creating a transistor with a working 1-nanometer gate. For the comparison of 1 nanometer, a strand of human hair is about 50,000 nanometers thick.
We made the smallest transistor reported to date,” said Javey, lead principal investigator of the Electronic Materials program in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Science Division. “The gate length is considered a defining dimension of the transistor. We demonstrated a 1-nanometer-gate transistor, showing that with the choice of proper materials, there is a lot more room to shrink our electronics.”
The world’s tiniest transistor is the size of a single molecule
So we can say this newly created transistor is the tiniest transistor in the world of electronics.
And while transistor counts continue to double on a predictable Moore’s Law path, other foundational issues are also becoming increasingly problematic with each new generation of chips, like the limitations of interconnect bandwidth that have severely lagged the computational capabilities of modern CPUs and GPUs, thus hampering performance and limiting the effectiveness of those extra transistors.
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Materials provided by DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Originally written by Sarah Yang. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.