Why we need to reinvent the transistor

Science : Have you noticed that computers have stopped getting faster?Microprocessor clock frequencies plateaued around 2005, a stunning break after a decades-long run of ever-compounding improvements in computing speed.The cause is a breakdown of the simple constant-electric-field scaling rules that had guided the shrinking of field-effect transistors for decades. As transistors shrank, they switched faster and used less power to switch but a certain amount of power is still needed to switch them from ON to OFF and vice versa.Companies continue to shrink the transistor, emphasizing the increasing number of parallel processors (cores) they can place on a single silicon chip. But with power supply voltages stuck at about 1 V, increasing clock frequencies as in the past would result in unsupportable increases in power dissipation and heat generation. The transistor is rapidly approaching its ultimate physical limits.The only way to decisively break the power dissipation bottleneck is to change the physics of transistor operation in ways that facilitate further reduction of operating voltage says Thomas N. Theis and Paul M. Solomon in Science.