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Junctionless Transistor Could Simplify Chip Making
An anonymous reader writes "A novel transistor architecture has been developed by a team of researchers led by Jean-Pierre Colinge at Tyndall National Institute at Cork, Ireland. Not many technology developments can be truly described as 'a breakthrough' or "revolutionary' but this might just fit the bill. It does depend on the extremely small dimensions of silicon nanowires just a few dozens of atoms wide. EE Times picked up on an announcement of a paper on the topic being published by Nature Nanotechnology."
I can see cell phones with the computing power of todays desktops in the next 5-10 years from this.
I can see cell phones with the computing power of todays desktops in the next 5-10 years WITHOUT this.
Virtually ideal transistors that are easy to fabricate will revolutionize the nanoprocessor industry.
I didn't see anything that suggested fabrication would be easy. In fact the article mentions that e-beam lithography was used. If e-beam lithography is a neccessary component then you won't see this in the mainstream anytime soon. The process is slow. So slow it is never used for industrial applications. That said, it is used in acidemia all the time because nothing allows you to get build smaller structures.
I can see cell phones with the computing power of yesterday's (Y2K) desktops NOW.
I believe the point is that this revolution is how that will be achieved, rather than through raw optimization. The closer we get to ideal parts, the more likely it is that my cell phone battery can actually handle playing something heavier than Snake for a few days, rather than a couple of hours tops. I'm looking forward to see how quickly this technology progresses, and not just because I am wishing my netbook could be playing TF2 now, instead of just posting on Slashdot while ignoring this circuit analysis presentation.
I didn't see anything that suggested fabrication would be easy.
Besides, we all know what Academics mean when they say in the next 5-10 years.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
meh, nanowires have been around for ages. Great, they've found a nice way of gating it, but really that's it. This is just a press release...
When they find a way of doing this without e-beam then it might be useful in industry.
Nothing to see here.
5-10? more probably will be around 20. Inertia happens. xkcd too.
I can see cell phones with the computing power of todays desktops in the next 5-10 years from this.
I can see cell phones with the computing power of todays desktops in the next 5-10 years WITHOUT this.
And I still won't have good coverage by my house, and the monthly bill will still be half a car payment, and all I want is a phone to make and receive calls.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Something to get excited about in the field of basic electronic components.
It's an interesting bit of basic research. There's probably another decade of almost-as-basic research to be done before we'll know if this will ever get out of the lab.
There are uncountably many interesting phenomena that never make it out of the lab for every one that does. Doing the basic research is a necessary aspect of technological innovation, but it is by no means sufficient, and the ability to do something on a small-scale with hands-on expertise is no indication that it will be useful or usable in an industrial setting.
One of the problems with tech news reporting is that the continual stream of stories like this one, full of breathless anticipation, is never followed by an honest review five years later of where the "breakthrough" ended up, which means "breakthroughs" tend to fade quietly from memory without any awareness or acknowledgement that they didn't pan out as expected.
If we saw more followups on ideas that never got beyond the "interesting phenomenon" stage we'd have a greater appreciation for the tiny fraction of innovations that do live to see the light of day in industrial applications. But that would require tech reporters to do more than lightly edit press releases and call them "news".
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
The lack of junctions certainly removes many fabrication steps. And e-beam lithography isn't necessary, it's just the patterning method they use. So it's only a matter of being able to match the feature size with another lithography method. I'm fairly certain 10nm lines made by photolithography have been demonstrated, which is what this structure is suggested for.
The article is very slim on details and dead wrong on some important facts.
The lack of a junction is not unique, ever heard of a MOSFET, "There is no pn junction, so there is no depletion region."
And I'm curious how they induce conductivity in silicon without dopants, considering that silicon is a semiconductor and a "semiconductor is a material that has an electrical conductivity between that of a conductor and an insulator", therefore "conductivity may easily be modified by introducing impurities into their crystal lattice" via doping.
And the article includes one other statement that is questionable in my opinion...
Gate leakage is an issue but the true bane of transistor power consumption is Rdson (resistance drain to source when transistor is on). The reason for the massive heat sinks and fans on processors today is not due to gate leakage its due to the resistance of the transistor channels and the various interconnects.
Current flowing through the resistive channel and internconnects in the millions of transistors in a processor generates heat for the same reason that a basic carbon based resistor connected to a voltage source will heat up. And increasing the doping level in the gates and poly silicon interconnects reduces resistance, with no doping it seems the problem of power loss through heat generation will only be worse.
The article is somewhat interesting and perhaps it is just a bad article lacking significant detail.
The writer for EE Times seems to have been confused. The story describes a field-effect transistor. They never had junctions.
What is described is a novel method of making a field-effect transistor.
See the Nature abstract: Nanowire transistors without junctions. Quote: "These devices have full CMOS functionality." I don't understand why they are talking about "doping gradients" when they are making FETs.
Wow! Nature.com charges $32 to see the full article!!
I definitely don't see how these are any "easier to make" than random MOSFETs (of which we make a billion to a chip these days and they all work out of the box).
I also don't really see how much "more ideal" they are than MOSFETs. In the end you're going to have to send a couple electrons around. The average transistor these days is switched by maybe a hundred electrons or so (maybe a few hundred, I haven't kept up with the field in the last 10 years). You're definitely not going to get that number below 1 electron for pure quantization reasons, and sheer statistical reliability will probably require many tens of them - so there's not much more "idealness" left to be squeezed out of the concept of "a small switch".
Quite frankly, nanowires have attained the status of nuclear fusion: always just around the corner in terms of economic/technological feasibility.
Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to the day when Moore's law hits a brick wall and people are forced to start thinking in better terms than "I want the same thing that I had last year, only faster and cheaper". Because that thinking has stunted actual (qualitative, not quantitative) technological progress for the last two decades.
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