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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."
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.
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.
What about Smoke Emitting Diodes? (or Light Emitting Resistors?)
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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 *permits* a one-way flow of current.
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.
Well, silicon is quite abundant on earth, about 15% of it, and more importantly almost 30% of the crust (still second to oxygen, by the way), but it's not even close to being "the most abundant in the universe". As irrelevant as it is to chip manufacturing, almost all baryonic matter in the universe is hydrogen and helium. Silicon is not even close...
No, it's a car without retro.
hydrogen is the most abundant.
I once created smoke emitting LEDs and I evacuated my workshop fast. I was using a clever power supply my dad had built. It had a pot from 0-10V and a rotary switch for +0, +10, +20. Very convenient but I left it on +10 by mistake. From model airplanes and bicycles I have seen a few smoke emitting NiCD batteries. One cold morning the battery pack on my bike shorted. Years ago a friend of mine chucked his NiCDs into the bottom of his backpack and walked home. The batteries melted a hole in the pack and were unusable afterwards.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
How about durability?
"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.
For Si vs H, does it matter if we're talking about by mass versus by number of atoms? It never occurred to me to consider which metric people might be talking about.
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.
It doesn't matter, no. Wikipedia says hydrogen makes up 75% of normal matter by mass and 90% by number of atoms in the observable universe. Silicon is just one of dozens of possible byproducts of, say, a supernova—its presence is tiny compared to even carbon and helium. No idea what GGP was smoking.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
75% of the universe's elemental mass is hydrogen. So either way...
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.
Do you call mercury "hydrargyrum"? Why not? Are you ignorant?
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
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.
He was probably thinking of abundance in earth's crust and assuming the universe is the same.
But no, Si is a distant second to oxygen in abundance in the Earth's crust.
It's the most abundant element in the Earth's crust that is a solid at room temperature. There you go.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Electron tunneling is not like going *through* a layer, so much as it's like having a certain probability of being on the other side to begin with. One of those quantum things.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium
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.
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$.
I do, specifically because I deal with hydrargarum iodide lamps.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It's like a light emitting diode of sorts, but instead of emitting light it permits unidirectional travel of power.
With use, most anything degrades. How fast depends on the amount of power you're pushing through.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Tunnelling is the way that electons move though solids by behaving like waves instead of particles. Its like ghosts going through brick walls only smaller. (Or light behaving like waves instead of particles, but bigger).
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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.
More specifically: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium#Etymology
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.
I think you mean Hydrogen. Silicon is after, at least, both Hydrogen and Helium.
Or perhaps you meant "most abundant element on the surface of the Earth"?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Not Iron yet, guess I can go back to sleep again.
Je me souviens.
...or Light Emitting Resistors?
You mean light bulbs?
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