Manufacturing the world's smallest electronic circuits

A team of scientists led by Guillaume Gervais of the Department of Physics, McGill University and Mike Lilly, the Sandia National Laboratory built one of the world's smallest electronic circuits.

The new circuit is made up of two wires separated by about 150 atoms or 15nm. This finding could greatly affect the speed and capacity of smaller integrated circuits in the future for devices from smart phones to computer monitors, televisions and navigation systems. Global.

This is the first time that scientists have studied how wires in an electronic circuit interact with other wires when they are tied together. The authors have found that the effect of one wire on the other wire can be positive or negative, meaning that the current in the wire can produce current in the other wire in the same direction, or counterclockwise

In addition to affecting the speed and performance of electronic circuits in the future, this discovery addresses one of the major challenges faced by future computer design. Markus Büttiker, a well-known theorist, is able to harness the energy lost in the form of heat in a conductor using other adjacent wires. As a result, these results will impact the future of both basic research and applied research in the nanotechnology industry.