tells us neat stuff (I quote without permission, but just to whet yr
appetite):
Meet the Transistor of the Future
by Ilan Greenberg
8:51am 21.Nov.97.PST
Things will get a lot faster in about 12 years.
That's when computers and other digital devices will
reap the rewards of Bell Laboratories' latest transistor
advance. The research arm of Lucent Technologies
published a report this week outlining its newest world
record, a transistor that is four times smaller, five
times
faster, and draws 60 to 160 times less power than
today's similar devices.
While Bell Labs and others - most recently Toshiba in
Japan - have built small transistors in the past, this
latest advance in nanotechnology is the most
promising new technology for building the kind of
power-integrated circuits that boast many billions of
transistors on a single silicon chip, as opposed to
today's chips, which pack mere millions of transistors
together.
[...]
While the achievement is an engineering milestone,
many other advances must come together before this
new transistor - which is only 182 atoms wide and
boasts an insulation layer that is only three layers of
atoms thick - appears in commercially available
devices.