New Transistors: Mechanical Advantage

The Economist reports that a new transistor made of tantalum is being used to make non-volatile memory computers.

The market news is quoted as saying,

The atomic transistor works, as its name suggests, by shuffling individual atoms around within the device. The atoms in question are copper, and the result of the shuffling is to create or destroy a conductive pathway between two crucial bits of the transistor, the source and the drain, thus switching the device on or off. That is possible because this part of the transistor is made of tantalum pentoxide, a material whose atoms are arranged in a lattice which contains holes large enough for copper atoms to squeeze through.

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