scott wrote:
>>> Not compared to modern RAM circuits. I think transistors are getting 
>>> down to the dozens-of-atoms size at this point.
>>
>> I doubt it.
> 
> What do you doubt, that silicon atoms are as big as 0.25 nm across, or 
> transistors are as small as 25 nm?

If you made a transistor that consisted of only a few atoms, it wouldn't 
work properly.

The concept of "electricity" is a simplification of the aggregate 
behaviour of individual charged particles. Like other concepts such as 
"temparature" and "pressure", it only makes sense at "large" scales.

If you were to make a device so small that it consists of only a few 
dozen atoms, you couldn't be able to reason about it using the usual 
laws of electricity. You'd have to use quantum dynamics or something.

(Let's face it, semiconductors work by having lots of silicon atoms with 
impurities of other atoms scattered around. Well if your transistor is 
only, say, 20 atoms in size, then they'd *all* be ordinary silicon 
atoms, and it wouldn't be a semiconductor. But that terms such as 
"conductor" make sense at these scales...)

Now there may or may not be a way of making some kind of switching 
device out of a few dozen atoms, but you can't make a "transistor" (as 
in, a sandwich of N-type and P-type semiconductive matter) with that few 
atoms. It wouldn't work properly.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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