# One of the World's Smallest Electronic Circuits Created



## Beastie (Dec 9, 2011)

> A team of scientists, led by Guillaume Gervais from McGill's Physics Department and Mike Lilly from Sandia National Laboratories, has engineered one of the world's smallest electronic circuits. It is formed by two wires separated by only about 150 atoms or 15 nanometers (nm).
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> The discovery, published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, could have a significant effect on the speed and power of the ever smaller integrated circuits of the future in everything from smartphones to desktop computers, televisions and GPS systems.
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> ...


source


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## Crivens (Dec 11, 2011)

Interesting, but maybe not usuable untill someone got the heisenberg compensator running. 

I remember a study from IBM w.r.t. the quantum mechanics of small transistors and that from a certain size downwards the chance of enough electrons to tunnel from source to gate to switch a transistor is so high that the resulting device is not reliable enough to be considered useable. Since I lost track of the study, I can not quote chapter & verse as to the limits they had. If someone has this, preferable as PDF and in public domain, I would like to get a copy. 

Applied to the findings in the article, I would like to see some numbers on reliability of the resulting computations. But an interesting find, nevertheless.


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