You may have noticed over the last few years that Moore's law is no longer applying to the real world. This observation states that over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years.
However, as microprocessors in computers have continued to become smaller, the architecture size has become incredibly small:- the new Skylake architecture to be released by Intel will use 14 nm semiconductors.
We are beginning to reach the limit in size where the information being passed is still completely reliable.
Would it be reasonable to ask how much quantum tunneling would occur in a semiconductor 5 nm in length? We can assume that in this CPU
Voltage = 1.2 V
Current = 63 A
I believe that "tunneling" in semiconductors, is another term for "leakage." When a transistor is reverse-biased, very little current flows (open circuit), when forward biased, a larger current flows (short circuit). If the leakage current is "large enough," the transistor will act as if it were permanently forward biased, and thus unable to change state. A CPU built with these transistors will not be a CPU! The leakage current (due to tunneling), depends on various parameters. One of them is the thickness of the p-n junction. The smallest thickness might be one atom of each type. – Guill Apr 16 '14 at 5:29
I think for tunneling to be observable, the device must be cooled to very low temperatures, like liquid Helium temperatures
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