A few comments from a non-physicist.
The first is a bit of nit-picking by me.
""The same research team announced in January that it had developed a wire of phosphorus and silicon just one atom tall and four atoms wide that behaved like copper wire. ""
The wire should have reenlisted as 1 atom by 4 atoms, not 1 atom tall and 4 atoms wide. One can't ascribe height or width or legit to either dimension.
The second point may be a bit of nit-picking as well. ""To me, this is the physical limit of Moore's Law," Klimeck says. "We can't make it smaller than this."
Well, one can theoretically make the wire of small atoms, and perhaps use a smaller atom for the transistor. Unless of course there is something a both the physics of the atoms which procludes such a substitution.
My nit-pciking aside, this sounds pretty amazing to me!! I have always thought that a great payoff for our investment dollars would be if the US government ratcheted up money for material science research.
