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Schroedinger's Cat's Whisker: a single benzine molecule as transistor

by Guy J Kewney | posted on 30 January 2010

A single-molecult transistor has been built - but "smaller and faster 'molecular computers' — if possible at all—are many decades away," reports Wireless Design Online.

WDO quotes a Nature article by an international team, including Mark Reed, the Harold Hodgkinson Professor of Engineering & Applied Science at Yale, and researchers from Yale University and the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea.

They showed that a benzene molecule attached to gold contacts could behave just like a silicon transistor.

There is a lot of interest in using molecules in computer circuits because traditional transistors are not feasible at such small scales (says WDO). But Reed stressed that this is strictly a scientific breakthrough, not a feasibility project.

"We're not about to create the next generation of integrated circuits," he said. "But after many years of work gearing up to this, we have fulfilled a decade-long quest and shown that molecules can act as transistors."