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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!
Everyone wants information to be free... Until they come up with an idea of their own and publish it.
er never mind, the point is _higher performance_ done more cheaply than before, not a cheaper diode in general.
the article?
There may be a building in your neighborhood that houses paywall penetrating tools. You can even go there and use them for free. I believe your community may call this building a "Library."
Or, if you are talking about them patenting the "invention", then yeah.. that sucks.
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
Information wants to be free. People want to control it and hide it and charge for it. But, if I told you a secret, you naturally want to share it. If I write a book, and people read it, that information is now theirs too, ie "free".
Of course people want free information. But, some people keep it in chains and lock it up and prevent it from becoming "public" knowledge, for their own personal gain. It's a war that has been waged for ever and will continue to rage...
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
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.
Just about every scientist who's employed in a university wants to give away their published articles for free to anyone with even a tiny interest. The only ones who like paywalls are publishers.
No, it's a car without retro.
But isn't a transistor just a diode with a way to control the junction? So maybe you could position a third wire and get some gain out of it.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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$.
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.
...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.