Transistors are an electronic component used in all digital computing today, and the amount of transistors on a CPU chip has grown exponentially since it’s advent. Check out this video below made by Gizmodo to celebrate the latest Intel chipset. It shows how the number of transistors has grown through the years (also known as Moores law). Note that the symbol that looks like a “u” is the greek lower-case letter “mu” that stands for micrometers, which is 1000 nanometers (nm), or 0.000001 meters. It refers to the size of the transistors.

So silicon is what’s used to make these badboys of computing, and they are believed to break down and become unusable if you go below 10nm. This roadblock has not been met yet, but it is not far off as intels latest chipset, as you can see in the video, is at 45nm. This is where the researchers from the University of Manchester come in, as they claim to have created a transistor out of a material called graphene that is about one molecule thick, or around a single nanometer. This could lead to a technology that would be able to replace the silicon transistors once they reach their limit, and keep the rising speed of computers going.

It should be said though, that this is not something that’s about to hit the market anytime soon. They have no viable way of creating these transistors, as they have no way of controlling how the graphene forms. To make the transistor they already have, it was basically just left to chance to get the shape they needed, as there is no known way yet to cut the graphene. Obviously this method can not be used in mass-production, but at least they now know of a material that is capable of functioning beyond the size threshold of silicon.