INTERCONNECTS

NEC claims it had developed the world's smallest transistor, which could allow chips powerful enough to build a supercomputer the size of a personal computer. NEC's design is 1/18th the size of current transistors, spokesman Mitsumasa Fukumoto said. A typical semiconductor chip will be able to hold 40 billion of the NEC transistors inside a chip measuring one square centimetre, giving more than 150 times current capacity, reported Reuters. Transistors are electronic circuits that form the basic building block for most semiconductors, a market worth $155 billion last year. Taking part of that revenue with the new transistor is still some way off for NEC, said Yuichi Ishida, an analyst at Mizuho Investors Securities in Tokyo. However, given that NEC said the transistor has a possible market launch set in 2020, revenue is likely to be some way off. John Yang, a Standard & Poor's analyst told Bloomberg that the challenge for NEC was not technological development but creating a business model and marketing the transistor effectively. He said Japanese companies were not good at translating R&D successes into commercial products.