The device, a three-dimensional FinFET, was built by scientists working at the National Nano Fab Center at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), the report said.

The team developing the tiny transistor was led by Choi Yang-kyu and as well as allowing the development of terabit memories it could allow conventional silicon integration to provide processors that run at 100-GHz, according to the report. The development also negates previously held ideas that electron devices of less than 5-nm in size would require the use of exotic technologies such as carbon nanotubes or information processing within molecular materials.

The latest development shows that “Moore's Law”, originally defined in 1965 by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore, is viable for the next 20 years, the report said.

Details of the 3-nm FinFET are due to published at the Symposium on VLSI Technology, which is due to be held in Hawaii in June, the report added.