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Indium-gallium-arsenide is among several promising semiconductors being studied to replace silicon. Such semiconductors are called III-V materials because they combine elements from the third and fifth groups of the periodic table.
The authors of the research papers are Gu; Wang; Purdue doctoral student H. Wu; Purdue postdoctoral research associate J. Shao; Purdue doctoral student A. T. Neal; Michael J. Manfra, Purdue's William F. and Patty J. Miller Associate Professor of Physics; Roy Gordon, Harvard's Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Chemistry; and Ye.
Transistors contain critical components called gates, which enable the devices to switch on and off and to direct the flow of electrical current. Smaller gates make faster operation possible. In today's 3-D silicon transistors, the length of these gates is about 22 nanometers, or billionths of a meter.
The 3-D design is critical because gate lengths of 22 nanometers and smaller do not work well in a flat transistor architecture. Engineers are working to develop transistors that use even smaller gate lengths; 14 nanometers are expected by 2015, and 10 nanometers by 2018.
However, size reductions beyond 10 nanometers and additional performance improvements are likely not possible using silicon, meaning new materials will be needed to continue progress, Ye said.
Creating smaller transistors also will require finding a new type of insulating, or "dielectric" layer that allows the gate to switch off. As gate lengths shrink smaller than 14 nanometers, the dielectric used in conventional transistors fails to perform properly and is said to "leak" electrical charge when the transistor is turned off.
Nanowires in the new transistors are coated with a different type of composite insulator, a 4-nanometer-thick layer o
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| Contact: Emil Venere venere@purdue.edu 765-494-4709 Purdue University Source:Eurekalert |