As semiconductor manufacturers continue to push down the size of their products’ wiring, a number of research labs have started looking into whether they can simply take the process to its logical conclusion: a transistor made from a single molecule. A number of these items have been demonstrated, and they do manage to control the current flow through the molecular transistor, but they do so through a variety of tricks that have nothing in common with the methods used for the semiconductors in our electronics. In today’s issue of Nature, an international team reports producing the first voltage-gated molecular transistors.
The basic principle behind a transistor is simple. All it needs is two electrodes, a source and a sink, and a gate that controls the flow of current between them. In semiconductor transistors, the gate contains a semiconductor and another electrode: raising or lowering the voltage in this electrode controls whether current can flow across the semiconductor between the source and sink.
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