NEC develops world’s smallest transistor

Engineers at NEC Corp. have developed the world’s smallest transistor with a gate length of 5 nanometers, the company said Monday.

NEC will disclose the development at the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers’ (IEEE) International Electron Devices Meeting that begins Monday and runs for three days in Washington, D.C.

At 5 nanometers, that makes the gate of the transistor about one-tenth the size of that possible with today’s most advanced mass production technologies. It also beats the 6-nanometer gate length device unveiled one year ago by IBM Corp. at the same conference.

Transistors are electronic switches and a basic building block of integrated circuits. For example, a memory chip developed earlier this year by Intel Corp. earlier this year packs 330 million transistors into a chip about the size of a fingernail.

Reducing the size of transistors is crucial to increasing processor performance or memory capacity, because more transistors can be squeezed into each chip, or to miniaturizing the chip, because smaller transistors require less space. The size reduction also means the transistor requires less power and so runs cooler.

NEC says the transistor is still a long way from being ready for use in production and said it does not anticipate commercial products based on the technology until around 2020.