The smallest wires ever developed in silicon -just one atom tall and four atoms wide - have been shown by a team of researchers from the University of New South Wales, Melbourne University and Purdue University to have the same current-carrying capability as copper wires.The discovery, which was published in a recent issue of the journal Science, has several implications, including:For engineers it could provide a roadmap to future nanoscale computational devices where atomic sizes are at the end of Moore's law. The theory shows that a single dense row of phosphorus atoms embedded in silicon will be the ultimate limit of downscaling.
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