But even if that succeeds, Dr Likharev does not think that the single-electron transistor could ever survive the more demanding environment in a processor.

ECONOMIST: The transistor��s heir

In December, a group led by Stephen Chou at the University of Minnesota announced that it had got a single-electron transistor to work albeit unreliably at room temperature.

ECONOMIST: The transistor��s heir

Konstantin Likharev, at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, a co-inventor of the single-electron transistor, is working on ways to combine it with conventional transistors to make super-dense memory chips.

ECONOMIST: The transistor��s heir

And in the current issue of Applied Physics Letters, a group led by Haroun Ahmed at the Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory in Britain reports another vital step, a single-electron transistor that, for the first time, amplifies its input signal (though only by a factor of 3.7, several hundred times more weakly than a conventional transistor does).

ECONOMIST: The transistor��s heir

Physicists at the University of New South Wales have created a transistor composed of a single atom, which is an amazing feat of nanoengineering, and could provide a better foundation for scalable quantum computing.

FORBES: Scientists Create A One-Atom Transistor

Last year Hewlett-Packard, along with a team of scientists from UCLA, proved the ability to make a switch that could be turned off and on, like a transistor, out of a single organic molecule called a catenane.

FORBES: The Science of Small

Last year Hewlett-Packard, along with a team of scientists from UCLA, proved that it is possible to make a switch that can be turned off and on, like a transistor, out of a single organic molecule called a catenane.

FORBES: The science of small

The transistor itself is composed of a single phosphorous-31 isotope, which has been precisely placed on a base of silicon using a Scanning Tunneling Microscope in an ultra-high vacuum chamber.

FORBES: Scientists Create A One-Atom Transistor