Phys.org February 7, 2022 Researchers in Germany produced nanowires consisting of a gallium arsenide core and an indium aluminum arsenide shell. The different chemical ingredients resulted in the crystal structures in the shell and the core having slightly different lattice spacings. This causes the shell to exert a high mechanical strain on the much thinner core changing the electronic properties of gallium arsenide in the core. They demonstrated that the strain in lattice-mismatched core/shell nanowires can affect the effective mass of electrons in a way that boosts their mobility to distinct levels. The electrons inside core of nanowires exhibited mobility […]
Category Archives: Transistors
The first topological acoustic transistor
Science Daily January 5, 2022 Topological materials are promising for transistors. However, it is difficult to turn off the dissipationless flow of electrons in topological materials. A team of researchers in the US (Harvard University, Wellesley College) has numerically demonstrated a topological logic gate for ultrasound by exploiting the large phase space of accidental degeneracies in a honeycomb lattice. They found that a degeneracy can be broken by six physical parameters and showed how to tune these parameters to create a phononic switch that transitions between a topological waveguide and a trivial insulator by ultrasonic heating. According to the researchers, […]
Revolutionary intelligent transistor can be adapted to perform very different tasks
Nanowerk December 1, 2021 An international team of researchers (Austria, France) has created a prototype of a flexible transistor harnessing the special properties of germanium and the use of dedicated program gate electrodes. They connected two electrodes with an extremely thin wire made of germanium, which is connected to metal on both sides with clean interface. A gate electrode is place above the germanium segment. The transistor also has a control electrode, which is placed on the interfaces between germanium and metal which can dynamically program the function of the transistor. The fusion of electron and hole conduction together with […]
Researchers develop sensitive new way of detecting transistor defects
Nanowerk October 11, 2021 A team of researchers in the US (NIST, Pennsylvania State University) concentrated on the boundary, or channel, between the thin oxide layer and the bulk semiconductor body which controls the resistance of the device from source to drain. They used electrically detected magnetic resonance (EDMR) to detect defects in the channel. To focus exclusively on activity in the channel, researchers use a technique called bipolar amplification effect (BAE). The parameter of importance is the interface defect density, which is a number that describes how many defects are within some area of the semiconductor-oxide interface. The BAE […]
New optical ‘transistor’ speeds up computation up to 1,000 times, at lowest switching energy possible
Phys.org September 22, 2021 Based on light-matter coupling, an international team of researchers (Russia, Switzerland, Germany, UK) created an optical switch which in a proof-of-principle demonstration achieved switching with just one photon at room temperature. The switch could act as a component that links devices by shuttling data between them in the form of optical signals, and serve as an amplifier, boosting the intensity of an incoming laser beam by a factor of up to 23,000. The device relies on two lasers to set its state to “0” or “1” and to switch between them. The switching occurs inside a […]
Bound-charge engineering: A new strategy to develop nanowire transistors
Phys.org January 13, 2021 Low-dimensional materials can have a relatively small number of free charges and weak screening compared to 3-D materials. This screening is especially crucial for the development of tunnel field-effect transistors, which heavily rely on the quantum tunneling of electrons across junctions. By atomistic quantum transport simulations researchers in Canada show how bound charges can be engineered at interfaces of Si and low- oxides to strengthen screening. To avoid compromising gate control, low- and high- oxides are used in conjunction. They demonstrated that in Si nanowire tunnel field-effect transistors bound charge engineering increases the on-state current by […]
Intel’s Stacked Nanosheet Transistors Could Be the Next Step in Moore’s Law
IEEE Spectrum December 29, 2020 The logic circuits behind just about every digital device today rely on a pairing of NMOS and PMOS. Researchers at Intel showed a different way: stacking the pairs so that one is atop the other. The scheme effectively cut the footprint of a simple CMOS circuit in half, meaning a potential doubling of transistor density on future ICs. The main part of the transistor consisting of a vertical fin of silicon as it does today, the nanosheet’s channel region consists of multiple, horizontal, nanometers-thin sheets stacked atop one another. They built an inverter using these […]
Breakthrough quantum-dot transistors create a flexible alternative to conventional electronics
Science Daily October 29, 2020 So far, most research on quantum dot electronic devices has focused on materials based on Pb- and Cd chalcogenides. In addition to environmental concerns associated with the presence of toxic metals, these quantum dots are not well suited for applications in CMOS circuits due to difficulties in integrating complementary n- and p-channel transistors in a common quantum dot active layer. A team of researchers in the US (Los Alamos National Laboratory, UC Irvine) demonstrated that by using heavy-metal-free CuInSe2 quantum dots, they could address the problem of toxicity and simultaneously achieve straightforward integration of complimentary […]
Engineering team develops novel miniaturized organic semiconductor
Science Daily October 8, 2020 Organic Field Effect Transistors (OFETs) have the advantage of being flexible when compared with their inorganic counterparts like silicon. The main limitation on enhanced performance and mass production of OFETs lies in the difficulty in miniaturizing them. Products currently using OFETs in the market are still in their primitive forms, in terms of product flexibility and durability. The major problem now confronting scientists in reducing the size of OFETs is that the performance of the transistor will drop significantly with a reduction in size, partly due to the problem of contact resistance. Researchers in Hong […]
Physicists develop printable organic transistors
Nanowerk September 22, 2020 Conventional horizontal organic thin-film transistors are very slow due to the hopping-transport in organic semiconductors, so they cannot be used for applications requiring high frequencies. Researchers in Germany have developed powerful vertical organic transistors with two independent control electrodes characterized by a high switching frequency and an adjustable threshold voltage. With these developments even single transistors can be used to represent different logical states (AND, NOT, NAND). Furthermore, the adjustable threshold voltage ensures signal integrity and low power consumption. In the future, these transistors could make it possible to realize even sophisticated electronic functions such as […]