Single-electron transistors

The invention of the transistor by John Bardeen and William Shockley in 1948 triggered a new era in electronics. Originally designed simply to emulate the vacuum tube, scientists soon found that this solid-state device could offer much more. The great potential of the transistor for speed, miniaturization and reliability has been fully exploited since well controlled materials such as pure single-crystal silicon became available. According to the latest "road-map" for the microelectronics industry microchips containing one billion transistors and operating with a clock cycle of a billionth of a second will be on the market just a few years into the new millennium