WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind., Jan. 5 (UPI) -- Australian and U.S. researchers say they've created wires in silicon 4 atoms wide and 1 atom tall that carry electrical current as well as copper wires do.
A team of scientists from the University of New South Wales, Melbourne University and Purdue University are engaged in research to develop future quantum computers in which single atoms are used for computation.
"We are on the threshold of making transistors out of individual atoms," says Michelle Simmons at the Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the University of New South Wales. "But to build a practical quantum computer we have recognized that the interconnecting wiring and circuitry also needs to shrink to the atomic scale."
The researchers made their atomic wire by inserting a string of phosphorus atoms into a silicon crystal, a Purdue release Thursday.
The innovation was to build the circuits up atom by atom, instead of by the current method of building microprocessors, in which material is stripped away.
"Typically we chip or etch material away, which can be very expensive, difficult and inaccurate," Gerhard Klimeck, a Purdue professor of electrical and computer engineering, said. "Once you get to 20 atoms wide you have atomic fluctuations that make scaling difficult.
"But this experimental group built devices by placing atomically thin layers of phosphorus in silicon and found that with densely doped phosphorus wires just four atoms wide it acts like a wire that conducts just as well as metal," he said.
