National Center for Computational Sciences

A simulation of electrical current moving through a futuristic electronic transistor has been modeled atom-by-atom in less than 15 minutes by Purdue University researchers.

The work demonstrates that future electronic devices can be quickly simulated on advanced computers, opening the door to new nanoscale semiconductor components that are more powerful and use less energy.

The simulation was run on Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Jaguar supercomputer, the world’s second fastest and one of just two computers capable of petascale performance.

The modeling of the transistor ran on more than 147,000 computer processors simultaneously, according to Gerhard Klimeck, professor of electrical and computer engineering and director for the National Science Foundation-funded Network for Computational Nanotechnology.

“If this had run on a single-processor computer it would have taken us 3.3 years to complete,” Klimeck said. “This is the first time we’ve been able to do an atomic-level simulation of a transistor within the realm of engineering instead of as a once-in-a-lifetime computer run.”

The transistor simulation represented 38,000 atoms and examined the current that passes through the experimental transistor.

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