Slashdot Mirror
Cheap Metal-Insulator-Metal (MiM) Diode Created
An anonymous reader writes "Progress on metal-insulator-metal diode manufacturing was just reported online in the professional journal Advanced Materials (abstract). For the first time a high-performance 'metal-insulator-metal' diode was created with cheap materials. This is a fundamental discovery. It could change the way manufacturers produce electronic products at high speed, on a huge scale, and at a very low cost, even less than with conventional methods."
A complete gamechanger, just like memristors!
I really hate this kind of thing... a potentially useful technology for building electronics devices at home, and it's behind a paywall.
the most abundant element in the universe? Or is it cheaper somehow in terms of production process?
A diode !!
WTF is a diode ?? No really what is a diode ??
I am no Electrical Engineer, but I am sure diodes are not the only component used in electrical circuits, so how is it a fundamental breakthrough that is going to affect the overall manufacturing speed of electronic products? Moreover, From TFA
High speed computers and electronics that don’t depend on transistors are possibilities
Which high speed computer in use today doesn't use transistors? The only related research in transistor-less gates I can think of is QCA and magnonics, both of which are a few years away from being used in Computer manufacturing, and neither uses diodes as the base.
One thing I did see is that this kind of diode can operate at 100's of THz frequencies, and that this enables nantennas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nantenna If these kind of MIM diodes can be made cheaply then a new cost effective class of solar power device may become feasible. So it could be a really big deal.
Why is Snark Required?
A diode is a GAY-NOT-GAY dude, of bicurious persuation, dude.
When I hear electron tunneling I can't help but see oxide or whatever the hell these things are made of slowly being eaten away.
Does this really mean cheaper, better, faster switching for free or is there a catch? Does it degrade with use like flash memory?
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
- Albert Einstein
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
This seems like an incredibly convenient discovery considering China's new embargo of rare metal exports to Japan and the US.
Carl Sagan quotes get you an automatic +5 on all posts.
This is a fundamental discovery. It could change the way manufacturers produce electronic products at high speed, on a huge scale, and at a very high profit. There.. fixed that for ya.
Quantum synapsing would be a more accurate description. Though the development is a few years out, this will revolutionize computing as we currently know it.
Man, I really dig the far-out way you spell "hydrogen".
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
As a solid state physicist, my fast and sloppy guess as to how this works, is that the fourth thin layer that is visible in the picture, is a sort of stair step so electrons coming from that direction have to do two easy tunnelings, while those from the other side have to do one hard tunneling.
So, will this get the Nobel Prize in ten years or later? It does really sound like a radical idea.
There is very little information online without subscribing to a journal, but it appears that the tunneling can be controlled in these devices. That is, a transistor is turned on and off by varying the electric field profile in the channel, a MIM diode can somehow have the tunneling modulated to turn it on or off.
I am a semiconductor scientist, but I completely fail to understand what this news is about. The article does nowhere mention the materials used, the device behavior, the application, the purpose or anything else.
A MIM device as is, is a capacitor. And that is exactly what the picture is showing. When this type of capacitor is scaled to the nanometer regime it starts to get leaky due to quantum mechanical tunneling through the dielectric. The abstract mentions 'controlled quantum mechanical tunneling'... Aha, this could be what it is about. But as long as metal electrodes are involved this will only create a nonlinear resistor. Still no idea what the exact purpose is.
Are nanoscale MIM capacitors new? No, not at all. Right now you have billions of them doing their job in your computers main memory. Depending on the vintage of your computer, these capacitors employ nanolaminates of ZrO2 and Al2O3 at a total thickness of 5 to 10 nanometers. Quantum electrical tunneling is of high relevance in these devices, since it leads to loss of stored information. So, is cheap new? A quick calculation suggests that the manufacturing cost of a single MIM device in a DRAM is approximately 10^(-10) US$.
Yeah. In twenty years.
Not saying this isn't a great invention; they deserve to earn from this (unlike software patent trolls). But the likely outcome of this system is that the technology will rot for decades until it enters the public domain.
Example: Perpendicular recording has been around since 1976 as an idea. It was commercially implemented in 2005. Part of that time was probably spent on making it viable, but the patents filed between 1976 and 1985 conveniently ran out before it ever reached the market.
I'm an academic, and I pay to have my articles published. Giving it away for free would actually be a step up for me.
That may be where the money is but the interesting applications are elsewhere. For example, MiMs could be useful as mixers and detectors all the way up to the visible. If they can be fabricated with a negative-resistance region they could serve as oscillators over the same range.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
of silicon.
We would have to run out of gravel, sand, rock, pebbles, stones and dirt first.
It's really hard to find and mine sand. In fact, we're going to run out real soon now! (Purification is another matter).
Does this mean we get a brand new PS4 for $150??? :DDD
The appearance of them is as old as corroded copper wire.. What has changed is that some materials specialists have figured out how to characterize these so called "parasitic" diodes and fabricate them with predictable parameters. As others have pointed out they are quite useful as they can be fabricated in the metal layers above the doped silicon, thus removing this type of component from the die and placing it in the metallization layers where there is a lot more room.
Now basically, as I understand it, diodes do not take up 1/2 a transistor foot print on the substrate. "Free as in beer" diodes.... from a floor-planner's perspective.
Money means production, production means process integration, process integration means it's available to anyone making a foundry order. Less interesting but profitable applications work fine for me.
If anyone’s interested in more on the science behind the story, including details on how the diodes were constructed and tested, we’ve set the original research article free to access for the next four weeks; you can find it here: http://www.materialsviews.com/details/news/874437/New_Diodes_Quantum_Tunnel_Their_Way_To_Improved_Electronics.html Adrian Miller Advanced Materials