IBM Corp research scientists were down in Orlando, Florida yesterday to claim that they have fabricated the world’s smallest transistors, and suggest that the devices will make possible memory chips of 4G-bits and higher, the kind of chips that will inevitably spell the death knell for the Compact Disk as a recorded music format – a 4G-bit chip could store over eight hours of music without compression: the previous smallest transistor was 20 times larger in area, and according to the researchers, the new transistors could easily be further reduced in size by a factor of two; the metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors should be usable in memory chips sometime in the first decade of the next century, but IBM says the electron-beam nanolithography fabrication techniques used in the experiment are not necessarily appropriate for the mass production of memory devices; the researchers demonstrated that device scaling is fully extendable down to 100 nanometers, and provided the device structures for this silicon n-channel MOSFET with unique features such as shallow trench isolation with butted gate electrodes leaving no overlap between the gate and the trench; fully overlapped source and drain contacts; and direct over-the-gate contacts; the IBM group is working towards producing an implementation of the device in CMOS technology.
