Nanoscale Transistors Could Enable More Efficient Electronics

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Silicon transistors, which are used to amplify and switch signals, are a critical component in most electronic devices, from smartphones to automobiles. But silicon semiconductor technology is held back by a fundamental physical limit that prevents transistors from operating below a certain voltage.

This limit, known as Boltzmann tyranny," hinders the energy efficiency of computers and other electronics, especially with the rapid development of artificial intelligence technologies that demand faster computation.

In an effort to overcome this fundamental limit of silicon, MIT researchers fabricated a different type of three-dimensional transistor using a unique set of ultrathin semiconductor materials.

Their devices, featuring vertical nanowires only a few nanometers wide, can deliver performance comparable to state-of-the-art silicon transistors while operating efficiently at much lower voltages than conventional devices.

This is a technology with the potential to replace silicon, so you could use it with all the functions that silicon currently has, but with much better energy efficiency," says Yanjie Shao, an MIT postdoc and lead author of a paper on the new transistors.

[...] In electronic devices, silicon transistors often operate as switches. Applying a voltage to the transistor causes electrons to move over an energy barrier from one side to the other, switching the transistor from off" to on." By switching, transistors represent binary digits to perform computation.

A transistor's switching slope reflects the sharpness of the off" to on" transition. The steeper the slope, the less voltage is needed to turn on the transistor and the greater its energy efficiency.

But because of how electrons move across an energy barrier, Boltzmann tyranny requires a certain minimum voltage to switch the transistor at room temperature.

To overcome the physical limit of silicon, the MIT researchers used a different set of semiconductor materials -gallium antimonide and indium arsenide - and designed their devices to leverage a unique phenomenon in quantum mechanics called quantum tunneling.

Quantum tunneling is the ability of electrons to penetrate barriers. The researchers fabricated tunneling transistors, which leverage this property to encourage electrons to push through the energy barrier rather than going over it.

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