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Subject: How Big is 6 Nanometers? A Comparison

Author: Bob Durrett

Date: 15:25:27 12/17/02

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On December 16, 2002 at 02:55:08, Terry McCracken wrote:

>
>
>
>ASICs
>IBM Announces World's Smallest Working Silicon Transistor
>
>Yorktown Heights, N.Y., December 9, 2002 -- IBM today announced the world's
>smallest working silicon transistor. With this transistor IBM has been able to
>push silicon to limits on a molecular scale not previously achieved.
>
>At six nanometers in length, this new transistor is at least 10 times smaller
>than the state-of-the-art transistors in production today. A nanometer (nm) is
>one billionth of a meter. The Consortium of International Semiconductor
>Companies in its 2001 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors
>projected that transistors have to be smaller than 9 nanometers by 2016 in order
>to continue the performance trend. IBM is the first company to make working
>transistors below that gate length.
>
>br>The full press release is at:
>http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/news/20021209_transistor.sht
>
>InfoWorld: Size matters: IBM creates world's smallest silico
>
>The full article is at:
>http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/12/09/021209hnibmsmall.xml

Here are a few tidbits of data, taken from Figure 2-3 of "Fundamentals of Light
Microscopy and Electronic Imaging," by Douglas B. Murphy, Copyright 2001 by
Wiley-Liss, Inc, ISBN 047125391X:

Viruses:  100 nm to 10 nm
Proteins:  10 nm to slightly more than 1 nm
Amino Acids:  somewhere around 1 nm
Atoms: 0.1 nm typical

Wavelengths:

Ultraviolet:  Roughly 10 nm to 100 nm  [rounded]
Gamma and X rays:  0.1 nm to 10 nm

Electron microscopes resolution limit: 0.1 nm


Summary: 6nm is smaller than a virus but comparable to the size of a protein
molecule.

Bob D.






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