Researchers at IBM plan to announce today that they have developed the world's smallest transistor, one that is at least 10 times smaller than transistors used on today's most advanced computer chips.
Transistors are the tiny electronic switches on a computer chip that amplify electric signals and regulate the flow of electrical current through a sliver of silicon. A current Pentium 4 chip, for example, has about 54 million transistors.
IBM's development, which will be announced at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco, will allow engineers to place billions of transistors on a single chip, enabling even more functions and ever-increasing speed on chips of the future.
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