A molecule, a transistor

2002/01/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Nanoteknologia

In 1965, engineer Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, announced that the number of transistors that microprocessors can contain would double every 18 months. Since then, this claim is called Moore's law. After about 35 years, it can be said that this law has been fulfilled satisfactorily, but scientists have begun to predict that the limit of this evolution is near. Engineers should study the existence of molecular transistors.

The transistor was invented in 1947 by Bell laboratory personnel, and for this invention he won the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. A month ago, other teams from the same laboratory developed sets of molecules that can act as transistors. Now they have taken another step in the attempt to miniaturize and have discovered that what the whole did can make a single molecule. Atomic or smaller transistors may develop in the future, but at the moment in the Bell laboratory they do not see the possibility of doing so.