Something I've wondered for decades now.
There is always a gap between leading edge state of the art advanced research in your big corporations versus the types of research conducted at universities. This has always been true.
The kinds of research done at Sandia National Labs, the old Bell Labs, the NSA, etc, is always well beyond the reduction to practical research at universities, but it is held in secret for years until it is "re-invented" in the academic setting.
Well these 1-atom transistors brings this to mind.
I think it was 1995, if I remember right, so ~20yrs ago, I was at Texas Instruments taking wafer samples to an advanced metrology lab for TEM analysis (the technique where would count the number of atoms in the gate oxide film and so on) and this part of the R&D site was very restricted access for corporate espionage concerns plus all the government defense projects we worked on.
Well in this building they had a museum of sorts that showcased the bleeding edge research milestones that had been achieved in internal projects but withheld from public domain for trade secret reasons, etc.
And one of these exhibits was what was purported to be a single-atom transistor that only used a single electron of current when it functioned.
I did not scrutinize the purported claims as if they were scientific fact, but I've thought about that archived "demo" for the past couple of decades wondering if our competitors and rivals had accomplished similar feats in their labs but the results would never see the light of day until they were replicated by a public agency (university or some such).
That hallway at TI held so many amazing prototypes, I only got to visit it twice, the second time I stayed there for hours, and then in the late nineties the whole thing was disassembled and carted off in boxes when TI began it huge phase of spinning off everything but its digital CMOS division.
Based on that experience though, I would not be surprised if Intel and IBM have achieved this single-atom transistor milestone years, if not decades, ago and probably have a few "beyond the single-atom xtor" concept and feasibility designs in their labs as well. The real skunkworks stuff.
(and who knows if the single-atom xtor stuff I saw in the nineties was at all comparable to what these researchers are unveiling now, they might be similar in name only and today's results truly are the first-ever kind of achievement)
Will my atoms leak out?
