from the Molectronics dept.
According to a press release (8 November 2001), researchers at Lucentís Bell Laboratories have announced they have succeeded in fabricating an individually addressable transistor whose channel consists of just one molecule. The latest results are a step forward from their work reported in October, in which they announced the creation of the single-molecule transistors. However, they had previously only been able to fabricate these "nanotransistors" as a matrix of a few thousand molecules that worked in tandem. Now, using a new technique, physicist Hendrik Schon and chemists Zhenan Bao and Hong Meng have succeeded in fabricating molecular-scale transistors that can be individually controlled. Their results were reported online in the 8 November 2001 edition of Science Express.
Using two of the nanotransistors, the Bell Labs scientists built a voltage inverter, a standard electronic circuit module that converts a "0" to a "1" or vice versa, creating a NOT gate for computer logic. The Bell Labs device is significantly different from the nanotube-based NOT gate created by IBM researchers announced in August.
Additional coverage is available in this news story from Reuters News Service and this Associated Press news story on the New York Times website.
