World's fastest transistor operates at blinding speed

19:00 11 April 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Will Knight

The world's fastest transistor has been developed by a pair of US researchers, possibly paving the way for a new generation of super-charged electronic chips.

Milton Feng and Walid Hafez at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, developed the record-breaking transistor by carefully blending different semiconducting materials within individual layers of the microscopic device.

Transistors are basic components within electronic circuits. They are used as tiny electronic switches or current amplifiers or for a variety of other tasks. Modern computer chips - like Intel's Pentium 4 - contain millions of individual transistors and the fundamental efficiency of these chips depends on the speed at which their transistors operate.

Feng and Hafez developed a transistor less than half a millionth of a metre long, with a maximum operating speed of 604 GHz, meaning it can carry out 604 billion operations every second.

"This establishes a new benchmark for transistor performance," says Doug Barlage at North Carolina State University, US. "It is probably three times faster than the fastest silicon-based device."