IBM Reports Breakthrough in Transistors

NEW YORK — International Business Machines on Tuesday announced experimental transistors that it said are the smallest in the world and the most powerful of their type.

IBM said the “field-effect” transistors could some day make it possible to forecast weather or recognize human speech on machines the size of today’s personal computers instead of giant mainframes.

The transistors have the highest “transconductance” of any field-effect transistor ever measured, according to Matt Wordeman, a manager at IBM’s laboratories in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.

Transconductance is a measure of a transistor’s ability to send a clear, strong electronic signal, a measure of its basic power.

The transistors are still experimental, and Wordeman said he could not say when they might be used in commercial products.

“It’s likely that they will at least be an element of the fastest computers possible,” Wordeman said.

Run Faster

Transistors are the tiny on-off switches that form the basis of computers and other electronic gear. Large chips contain hundreds of thousands of them. Several laboratories have reported devising transistors that have certain features as small as one-tenth of a micron, which is one-thousandth the thickness of a human hair. But IBM said its transistors are the first to miniaturize all the critical parts, several of them to tenth-micron dimensions.

Computers run faster with smaller transistors because electrical signals take less time getting from one place to another.

Logic chips based on one-tenth micron technology could hold millions of elements and switch signals in as little as 10 trillionths of a second, 10 times faster than those used today, IBM said.

One drawback is that the transistors must be cooled with liquid nitrogen to a temperature of 321 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Wordeman said the parts that require supercooling could be enclosed in one small part of the computer.

Recent advances in achieving superconductivity at higher temperatures could be useful in the future as chips continue to shrink and electrical resistance becomes a more significant problem, Wordeman said.

IBM’s breakthrough gives field-effect transistors a leg up against their biggest competitors, bipolar transistors. Bipolar transistors are less compact, take more power and heat up faster.