Korea Unveils Smallest-Ever Transistor

The world’s smallest transistor, 40,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, has been developed in Korea.

Professor Choi Yang-gyu of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and a National NanoFab Center research team announced yesterday that they successfully developed a silicon-based three-dimensional 3nm Fin Field Effect Transistor (FinFET). A nanometer, or nm, is a unit of spatial measurement one billionth of a meter.

FinFET transistors can be used to hold the data equivalent of 1,250 DVDs or 12,500 years’ worth of newspapers on a thumbnail-sized chip.

The transistor is not only smaller than the 4nm flat transistor unveiled by Japan’s NEC in 2003, but also has improved memory capacity, which is a breakthrough toward the development of next generation terabit (one trillion bit) semiconductors.

Scientists have had difficulties scaling down the size of transistors because flat transistors did not work if they were smaller than 100nm, and high voltages and the flow of electricity often destabilized electric currents.

They then shifted their focus from utilizing existing silicon to inventing new nanometer-sized materials, such as carbon nanotubes or molecule elements. The research team reduced electric leakage by three-dimensionally arranging gate electrodes at the electricity-flowing pathways within the chip’s silicon elements.

The team’s results will be released at the VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) International Symposium in Hawaii on June 13.

kunta@donga.com