IT abroad: One of the world’s smallest electronic circuits developed in the United States

A team of scientists from McGill’s Physics Department and Sandia National Laboratories in the USA, has engineered one of the world's smallest electronic circuits. It is formed by two wires separated by only about 150 atoms or 15 nanometers (nm).

Guillaume Gervais, one of the scientists to lead the project, says that this discovery could have a significant effect on the speed and power of the ever smaller integrated circuits of the future in everything from smartphones to desktop computers, televisions and GPS systems. “This is the first time that anyone has studied how the wires in an electronic circuit interact with one another when packed so tightly together”, Gervais says.

Scientists say that in the future such super compact circuits will help to deal with several problems. For instance, it is said to help manage the ever-increasing amount of heat produced by integrated circuits.