The transistor's killer performance stems from the unique properties of the 2021 ferroelectric material, which is composed of razor-thin layers of boron nitride stacked parallel to each other.
The article seems to omit some data from the original post on MIT's site. They did 100 billion switches with no / negligible signs of degradation. In the it paper they mention an endurance potential on par of that of state of the art FeFET devices. I couldn't find a link to the paper freely available, but it seems to be a noteworthy achievement as the sliders only move a few atoms width per switch.
Oh that's a lot more meaningful. It's so disappointing reading news on topics I understand instead of root sources. I always wonder how I am being mislead in things I don't know well.
I also wonder what happens after 100 billion switches since that's such a trivial number.
The "nanosecond switching" isn't really impressive either, since it wouldn't be able to keep up with a 1 GHz clock because RTL involves signals passing through several gates (and each gate is made up of multiple transistors unless it's a not gate) each cycle, so if each of those take a nanosecond, that limits the clock rate to 1 / number of transistors GHz, which it also wouldn't be able to hit because signals also take time to travel along the wires between transistors.
For 5 GHz, signals must make it from one register, through all of the logic, and latch properly into the next register in 0.2 ns.