An international team of scientists from the US, Germany and Japan create what is possibly the smallest transistor ever-- one consisting of a single molecule and 12 atoms, reaching the very limit of Moore's law.
For the curious, the team used a highly stable scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to build the transistor out of a single molecule of phthalcocyanine and 12 positively charged indium atoms on an indium arsenide (InAs) crystal. The indium atoms act as electrical gates, allowing single atoms to hop over to change the charge state of the molecule.
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