RESEARCH NEWS “
As transistors have grown smaller, their gates have shrunk, too. But at smaller sizes, that type of lockstep miniaturisation won’t work: Gates will become too small to reliably switch transistors off
Award for outstanding contributions to solid-state devices and technology. The award announcement cited Hoyt’s “groundbreaking contributions involving strained-silicon semiconductor materials.”
Gatekeeping
Another crucial aspect of the new transistor is its trigate design. If a transistor is a switch, throwing the switch means applying a charge to the transistor’s “gate.” In a conventional transistor, the gate sits on top of the “channel,” through which the charge carriers flow. As transistors have grown smaller, their gates have shrunk, too. But at smaller sizes, that type of lockstep miniaturisation won’t work: Gates will become too small to reliably switch transistors off. In the trigate design, the channels rise above the surface of the chip, like boxcars sitting in a train yard. To increase its surface area, the gate is wrapped around the channel’s three exposed sides - hence the term “trigate.”
By demonstrating that they can achieve high hole mobility in trigate transistors, Hoyt and her team have also shown that
their approach will remain useful in the chips of the future.“The germanium part helps in increasing the drive current, and the trigate part helps in reducing the leakage in the off state,” says Krishna Saraswat, the Rickey/Nielsen Professor in Engineering at Stanford University, who was not involved in this research. “So a combination of those two just gives you an ideal transistor for the next generation.”
”
Saraswat believes that the semiconductor industry is already planning a move toward germanium circuits. “The choice is to scale the silicon transistor without any performance gains - just get to higher packing density - or get higher packing density as well as better performance,” he says. “And it’s fairly clear that the industry will go for high-strain germanium.” The MIT researchers’ work was supported by the U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Semiconductor Research Corporation.
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www.siliconsemiconductor.net Issue I 2013
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