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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."
HP just developed an implementation in the last year.
It will take them a couple years to get a production line going, then a few more years before it starts showing up in products.
er never mind, the point is _higher performance_ done more cheaply than before, not a cheaper diode in general.
A diode maintains a one way flow of current.
Whatever happened to memristors?
HP has partnered with Hynix to develop the manufacturing process and commercialize memristor products. Memristors used for storage will eventually appear as ReRAM (resistive RAM.) Meanwhile, other companies are working on memristor designs based on material other than TiO2 as is used by HP.
Would someone with a good grounding in semiconductors please elaborate on why MIM diodes are significant? I have a good handle on basic electronics but not enough experience to deduce how MIM diodes would improve circuit design.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
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?
the most abundant element in the universe?
The most abundant element in the universe is Hydrogen. Silicon, while plentiful in raw form, must be purified, crystallized, doped, etc. for use in microelectronics. This is an expensive, energy intensive process with less than perfect yield. Copper and aluminum are vastly easier to deal with.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
In other words, it's an electronic check valve.
I think you're right, and I would guess that the startup costs are much cheaper with this technology. But I wonder how useful it is when we can already print thousands transistors for pennies after the initial cost of a fab. Maybe it will allow for easier tinkering for people sitting in their garage? Would be pretty cool to build your own diode.
All your base are belong to Wii.
As a published academic myself, I concur. I don't get a dime from my published articles so paywalls don't help me. I benefit from people hearing about, reading, being influenced by and eventually citing my work because those things lead to higher academic ratings which lead to better positions, grants, etc.
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.
You need to look elsewhere.
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$.
No. It's that MiMs are fast. The best junction diodes run out of steam at a few THz while MiMs work up into optical frequencies and so can be used to rectify sunlight. MiMs have been made before and are used in some exotic lab equipment but those point-contact devices are hard to make and touchy. These guys claim to have produced MiMs using more or less standard planar processes.
Here's a paper that explains MiM theory, though it isn't about this development.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
It's a bit surprising to find out that some relatively unknown experimenters may have actually stumbled on tunnel-diode-like technology in the early days of radio over 80 years ago. I think they were officially invented by Sony in 1957, although most that I've seen in the U.S. came from G.E.
http://www.sony.co.jp/Products/SC-HP/outline/overview/history.html
Perhaps some here have experimented with a homemade cat-whisker diode for a crystal radio.
As it turns out, making a little oscillator with a homemade metal-metal tunnel diode is easy enough that many here could do it. (a couple of variations using other materials are linked from the page below)
http://home.earthlink.net/~lenyr/ntype-nr.htm
I wish the story had made it clear just what sort of diode properties besides "cheaper" they were going for. It doesn't seem like they'd merge into current I.C. designs being of a much different process. The energy conversion thing is interesting, but that's much different than fast efficient diodes for switching power supplies or tunnel diodes for oscillators and high-frequency or pulse/trigger circuits. And it's a little hard to tell exactly how it ties in with LCD technology as that's pretty low frequency. Most digital I.C.s don't need or contain many diodes. They don't say anything about this helping to make better transistors. Normal diodes, even fast and cheap ones, usually can't replace transistors. And more unusual diodes with the negative-resistance effects of tunnel-diodes would certainly would not be a simple transplant into logic circuits. They've been well suited to a small niche of applications in the past.
I guess it is time to dig up the old Trek episode where Spock was on old Earth building electronics with a bunch of vacuum tubes...
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.