Speeding Through Semiconductor Nanowires: New Basis for Ultrafast Transistors

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Speeding Through Semiconductor Nanowires: New Basis for Ultrafast Transistors:

Smaller chips, faster computers, less energy consumption. Novel concepts based on semiconductor nanowires are expected to make transistors in microelectronic circuits better and more efficient. Electron mobility plays a key role in this: The faster electrons can accelerate in these tiny wires, the faster a transistor can switch and the less energy it requires. A team of researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), the TU Dresden, and NaMLab has now succeeded in experimentally demonstrating that electron mobility in nanowires is remarkably enhanced when the shell places the wire core under tensile strain. This phenomenon offers novel opportunities for the development of ultrafast transistors.

Nanowires have a unique property: These ultra-thin wires can sustain very high elastic strains without damaging the crystal structure of the material. And yet the materials themselves are not unusual. Gallium arsenide, for example, is widely used in industrial manufacturing, and is known to have a high intrinsic electron mobility.

To further enhance this mobility, the Dresden researchers produced nanowires consisting of a gallium arsenide core and an indium aluminum arsenide shell. The different chemical ingredients result 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. The gallium arsenide in the core changes its electronic properties. "We influence the effective mass of electrons in the core. The electrons become lighter, so to speak, which makes them more mobile," explained Dr. Emmanouil Dimakis, scientist at the HZDR's Institute of Ion Beam Physics and Materials Research and initiator of the recently published study.

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