RESEARCH NEWS
RESEARCHERS AT PURDUE UNIVERSITY have announced a new type of transistor shaped like a Christmas tree, where each transistor contains three tiny nanowires made of InGaAs.
So III-Vs replacing silicon seems to be a hot research topic, with InGaAs being one of the main contenders. Now scientists at MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories have also created a compound transistor, which performs well despite being just 22nm length. This also makes it a promising candidate to eventually replace silicon in computing devices, says co- developer Jesús del Alamo, the Donner Professor of Science in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), who built the transistor with EECS graduate student Jianqian Lin and Dimitri Antoniadis, the Ray and Maria Stata Professor of Electrical Engineering.
To keep pace with our demand for ever-faster and smarter computing devices, the size of transistors is continually shrinking, allowing increasing numbers of them to be squeezed onto microchips. “The more transistors you can pack on a chip, the more powerful the chip is going to be, and the more
functions the chip is going to perform,” del Alamo says.
But as silicon transistors are reduced to the nanometre scale, the amount of current that can be produced by the devices is also shrinking, limiting their speed of operation. This has led to fears that Moore’s Law - the prediction by Intel founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on microchips will double every two years - could be about to come to an end, del Alamo says.
To keep Moore’s Law alive, researchers have for some time been investigating alternatives to silicon, which could potentially produce a larger current even when operating at these smaller scales. One such material is the compound InGaAs, which is already used in fibre-optic communication and radar technologies, and is known to have extremely good electrical properties, del Alamo says.
But despite recent advances in treating the material to allow it to be formed into a transistor in a similar way to silicon, nobody has yet been able to produce devices small enough to be
The race is on to replace silicon with InGaAs
Silicon’s crown is under threat. The semiconductor’s days as the king of microchips for computers and smart devices could be numbered, thanks to the development of the smallest transistor ever to be built from III-V semiconductor indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs).
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www.siliconsemiconductor.net Issue I 2013
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