NEC Corp. (Tokyo, Japan) has developed what it claims to be the world's smallest transistor. The new small 5nm gate transistor, surpassing IBM Corp.'s 6nm gate transistor, will be introduced at an international conference in Washington, DC, on December 9, 2003, according to a company spokesman.
NEC had developed the transistor, which is one-eighteenth the size of conventional models, to lay the foundation for the development of supercomputers that could make 600 billion calculations every second and not exceed the size of a desktop personal computer.
"We are still at a preliminary stage, so it could take at least 20 years to put this into commercially viable products," the spokesman added.
