In 2006, a team of Korean researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and the National Nano Feb Center codeveloped a 3 nmtransistor, the world's smallest nanoelectronic device based on conventional technology, called a fin field-effect transistor (FinFET). It is the smallest transistor ever produced.
In 2010, an Australian team announced that they fabricated a single functional transistor out of 7 atoms that measured 4 nm in length.
In 2012 a single atom transistor was fabricated using a phosphorus atom bound to a silicon surface (between two significantly larger electrodes). This transistor could be said to be a 180 pm transistor (the Van der Waals radius of a phosphorus atom); though its covalent radius bound to silicon is likely smaller. Making transistors smaller than this will require either using elements with a smaller atomic radius, or using subatomic particles—like electrons or protons—as functional transistors.
