NEC shoots for PC-sized supercomputer

By CNETAsia Staff, CNETAsia
Published on ZDNet News:�December 10, 2003, 6:53 AM PT

Japan's computer giant NEC Corp said it has developed the world's smallest transistor, a breakthrough that could make it possible to build a supercomputer the size of a personal computer.

An NEC spokesman confirmed earlier reports the design is 1/18th the size of current transistors. It has a gate with a width of only 5 nanometers. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.

A typical semiconductor chip will be able to hold 40 billion of the NEC transistors inside a chip measuring one square centimeter, more than 150 times current capacity, reported Reuters, a news wire agency.

Transistors are electronic circuits that make up most semiconductors, a global market worth US$115 billion in 2002.

However, given that NEC said the transistor has a possible market launch set in 2020, revenue is likely to be some way off. John Yang, a Standard & Poor's analyst told Bloomberg, a business news wire, that the challenge for NEC was not technological development but creating a business model and marketing the transistor effectively. He said Japanese companies were not good at translating R&D successes into commercial products.

NEC has been pushing R&D hard, and the results showed off in the fourth-highest number of patents from the U.S. patent and trademark office in 2002, behind IBM, Canon and Micron Technology, the world's second-largest memory chip maker, coming in third.

Besides desktop sized supercomputers, transistors like NEC's will help a wide range of high-tech applications, such as increasing a cell phone's charge time from 150 minutes to around 60 hours.

The development is to be announced at the International Electron Devices Meeting held this week in Washington.