Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have successfully breached the physical limit for transistor size. This transistor is the smallest ever created to date with a gate length of just 1nm. By using the right materials, such as carbon nanotubes and molybdenum disulfide, the physical limitations of pure silicon were eliminated.

The current industry standard was set by Intel with their 14nm Skylake processors, with 10nm processors being developed for next year. Foundries around the world are working towards 7nm transistors, but with this new development, it looks like progress may start to speed up.