Tiny transistor could cut supercomputer size
Published: 10 Dec 2003 09:55 GMT
Japan's computer giant NEC said it has developed the world's smallest transistor, in a breakthrough that could make it possible to build a supercomputer the size of a personal computer.
An NEC spokesman confirmed earlier reports that the design is 1/18th the size of current transistors. It has a gate with a width of only 5 nanometres. A nanometre is a billionth of a meter.
A typical semiconductor chip will be able to hold 40 billion of the NEC transistors inside a chip measuring one square centimetre, giving more than 150 times current capacity, reported Reuters, a news wire agency.
Transistors are electronic circuits that make up most semiconductors, a global market worth $115bn (£66bn) in 2002.
However, given that NEC said the transistor has a possible market launch set in 2020, revenue is likely to be some way off. John Yang, a Standard & Poor's analyst told Bloomberg, a business news wire, that the challenge for NEC was not technological development but creating a business model and marketing the transistor effectively. He said Japanese companies were not good at translating R&D successes into commercial products.
NEC has been pushing R&D hard, and the results showed off in the fourth-highest number of patents from the US patent and trademark office in 2002, behind IBM, Canon and Micron Technology, the world's second-largest memory chip maker, coming in third.
Besides desktop-sized supercomputers, transistors like NEC's will help a wide range of high-tech applications, such as increasing a cellphone's charge time from 150 minutes to around 60 hours.
The development is to be announced at the International Electron Devices Meeting held this week in Washington.
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