In a transistor, electrons scurry along a channel whose length partly determines the device’s speed. Chip makers have devised clever schemes to shrink circuitry, including transistors and their channels, thereby speeding up electronic processing.
Now, using a novel method of making transistors, Jan Hendrik Schön and his colleagues at Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., have built prototype devices with channels the length of a single molecule, about 2 nanometers.
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