Scientists from US-based Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs research and development unit report that they have succeeded in fabricating the world’s first individually addressable transistor with a channel that consists of just one molecule.

Last month the same research team unveiled a transistor with a channel - the space between the electrodes where the transistor’s electronic switching and amplification take place - that comprised just a single molecule, but that device could only be fabricated as a matrix of a few thousand molecules that worked in tandem. According to the team the new transistor is a major advance from that, because it can be individually controlled through the channel.

The new transistor is only a billionth of a metre in size - less than a tenth of any transistor produced previously, Bell Labs says, and it is made of an organic semiconductor material containing carbon, hydrogen and sulphur. In addition the transistor can be manufactured without clean room technology.

The Bell Labs scientists believe that these nanotransistors could one day be used in microprocessors and memory chips, enabling thousands of times as many transistors to be squeezed onto each chip than is currently possible.