Bangalore: With the creation of a working transistor from a single Phosphorous atom, Scientists were finally able to challenge the Moore’s law, which dominated the trend in computer hardware for more than half a century.

A team from Simmons Group which includes scientists from University of Melbourne and Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, were successful in making the first working transistor of this kind by engraving a single atom into a Silicon bed, with metallic contacts to apply voltage and “gates” to control electric flow, reported in the journal, Nature Nanotechnology.

Moore’s Law, which was named after Gordon E Moore, Intel’s co founder, states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an Integrated Circuit doubles approximately every two years and it is predicted to reach its limit with existing technology in 2020. The law is currently used in industry to guide long term planning and set targets.

Michelle Simmons, director of ARC Center for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the University of New South Wales said, “we really decided 10 years ago to start this program to try and make single-atom devices as fast as we could, and beat that law. So here we are in 2012, and we’ve made a single-atom transistor roughly 8 to 10 years ahead of where the industry is going to be.”

The main limitation of the latest discovery is that the atom should be kept at a temperature of minus 391 degree Fahrenheit to prevent it from moving outside the channel. “Because of it, the result should be seen as the proof of a principle rather than manufacturing process,” stated the report in journal.

The finding could be big help in the future of quantum computers, which will be significantly faster and smaller than the current ones.