Transistors consist of three electrodes: the gate, the source and the drain, with the gate controlling the flow of electrons between the other two. “We have shown that you can make extremely small indium gallium arsenide MOSFETs with excellent logic characteristics, which promises to take Moore’s Law beyond the reach of silicon,” del Alamo says.
Now del Alamo, Antoniadis and Lin have shown it is possible to build a nanometer-sized metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) - the type most commonly used in logic applications such as microprocessors - using the material. 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 packed in ever-greater numbers into tomorrow’s microchips. One such material is the compound indium gallium arsenide, which is already used in fiber-optic communication and radar technologies, and is known to have extremely good electrical properties, 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. 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. “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.īut as silicon transistors are reduced to the nanometer scale, the amount of current that can be produced by the devices is also shrinking, limiting their speed of operation. 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. This 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. The compound transistor, built by a team in MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories, performs well despite being just 22 nanometers (billionths of a meter) in length. By changing the material from silicon to MoS2, we can make a transistor with a gate that is just 1 nanometer in length, and operate it like a switch.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 a rival material, indium gallium arsenide. Industry has been squeezing every last bit of capability out of silicon. This research shows that sub-5-nanometer gates should not be discounted. The semiconductor industry has long assumed that any gate below 5 nanometers wouldnt work, so anything below that was not even considered, said study lead author Sujay Desai, a graduate student in Javeys lab. The development could be key to keeping alive Intel co-founder Gordon Moores prediction that the density of transistors on integrated circuits would double every two years, enabling the increased performance of our laptops, mobile phones, televisions, and other electronics.
Philip Wong, a professor at Stanford University. Other investigators on this paper include Jeff Bokor, a faculty senior scientist at Berkeley Lab and a professor at UC Berkeley Chenming Hu, a professor at UC Berkeley Moon Kim, a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas and H.S. The findings were published today in the journal Science. MoS2 is part of a family of materials with immense potential for applications in LEDs, lasers, nanoscale transistors, solar cells, and more. The key was to use carbon nanotubes and molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), an engine lubricant commonly sold in auto parts shops. We demonstrated a 1-nanometer-gate transistor, showing that with the choice of proper materials, there is a lot more room to shrink our electronics. The gate length is considered a defining dimension of the transistor.
We made the smallest transistor reported to date, said Javey, lead principal investigator of the Electronic Materials program in Berkeley Labs Materials Science Division. For comparison, a strand of human hair is about 50,000 nanometers thick. Some laws are made to be broken, or at least challenged.Ī research team led by faculty scientist Ali Javey at the Department of Energys Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has done just that by creating a transistor with a working 1-nanometer gate.
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