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Can New Metal-Air Transistors Replace Semiconductors and Continue Moore's Law? (ieee.org)
Will Moore's law really come to an end by 2025? Maybe not...
An anonymous reader quotes IEEE Spectrum: [R]esearchers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, believe a metal-based field emission air channel transistor (ACT) they have developed could maintain transistor doubling for another two decades. The ACT device eliminates the need for semiconductors. Instead, it uses two in-plane symmetric metal electrodes (source and drain) separated by an air gap of less than 35 nanometers, and a bottom metal gate to tune the field emission. The nanoscale air gap is less than the mean-free path of electrons in air, hence electrons can travel through air under room temperature without scattering...
Using metal and air in place of semiconductors for the main components of the transistor has a number of other advantages, says Shruti Nirantar, a Ph.D. candidate in RMIT's Functional Materials and Microsystems Research Group. Fabrication becomes essentially a single-step process of laying down the emitter and collector and defining the air gap. And though standard silicon fabrication processes are employed in producing ACTs, the number of processing steps are far fewer, given that doping, thermal processing, oxidation, and silicide formation are unnecessary. Consequently, production costs should be cut significantly. In addition, replacing silicon with metal means these ACT devices can be fabricated on any dielectric surface, provided the underlying substrate allows effective modulation of emission current from source to drain with a bottom-gate field. "Devices can be built on ultrathin glass, plastics, and elastomers," says Nirantar. "So they could be used in flexible and wearable technologies."
The article also suggests ACT devices could become important in space exploration, since electrons would be unaffected by extraterrestrial vacuums and radiation.
Nirantar was lead author on a new paper published in Nano Letters, and believes that their new approach "means we can stop pursuing miniaturization, and instead focus on compact 3D architecture, allowing more transistors per unit volume."
An anonymous reader quotes IEEE Spectrum: [R]esearchers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, believe a metal-based field emission air channel transistor (ACT) they have developed could maintain transistor doubling for another two decades. The ACT device eliminates the need for semiconductors. Instead, it uses two in-plane symmetric metal electrodes (source and drain) separated by an air gap of less than 35 nanometers, and a bottom metal gate to tune the field emission. The nanoscale air gap is less than the mean-free path of electrons in air, hence electrons can travel through air under room temperature without scattering...
Using metal and air in place of semiconductors for the main components of the transistor has a number of other advantages, says Shruti Nirantar, a Ph.D. candidate in RMIT's Functional Materials and Microsystems Research Group. Fabrication becomes essentially a single-step process of laying down the emitter and collector and defining the air gap. And though standard silicon fabrication processes are employed in producing ACTs, the number of processing steps are far fewer, given that doping, thermal processing, oxidation, and silicide formation are unnecessary. Consequently, production costs should be cut significantly. In addition, replacing silicon with metal means these ACT devices can be fabricated on any dielectric surface, provided the underlying substrate allows effective modulation of emission current from source to drain with a bottom-gate field. "Devices can be built on ultrathin glass, plastics, and elastomers," says Nirantar. "So they could be used in flexible and wearable technologies."
The article also suggests ACT devices could become important in space exploration, since electrons would be unaffected by extraterrestrial vacuums and radiation.
Nirantar was lead author on a new paper published in Nano Letters, and believes that their new approach "means we can stop pursuing miniaturization, and instead focus on compact 3D architecture, allowing more transistors per unit volume."
1) Moore's Law is already dead
2) Air-gap transistors have been around since mid 1990s.
3) No offense, but it is doubtful such a breakthrough would come from some university I have never heard of in Australia. Based on their Wikipedia page they are known for art and design.
potentially, at very small scales (people talking about only room for one water molecule) electrons tunneling (due to quantum effects,.
I believe this is based on quantum tunnelling. Fowler–Nordheim tunnelling in tungsten and gold devices, while using Schottky emission in platinum device. Whether this is because of the electric field strength needed is lower in platinum device isn't clear, as increasing the field strength tends to favor FN tunnelling.
Its pretty interesting stuff, but will it work? That would be pretty cool if it does.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
You aren't gonna get into the double-digit GHz with standard single-core performance with an ordinary device (i.e. not liquid-cooled superconducty stuff).
That's just a fact of life, and physics. And such, we need to parallelise everything we can. There's nothing you might need to perform "ordinary" computing (including games) that can't really be parallelised well. Almost everything can. But we haven't bothered.
The wake-up call was 3D graphics, yes, but the reality is that everything needs to be threaded, thread-safe and parallelisable. The objections come from people who find it tricky to program that way, because we were almost all brought up on the concept of a list of instructions that you just run in order, and very few people were ever taught anything different. For decades "multi-threading" was just being able to run two such programs (if you did it carefully) in parallel, not actually parallelising the task or the solution.
Fact is, until something like quantum computing becomes mainstream (which is a way off, and still needs everyone to totally up-end their programming paradigms), you're stuck at the clock-speeds that you are and all you can do is add thousands of cores at that clock speed.
Notice how tiny embedded processors have come along in leaps and bounds, from microcontroller speeds to several GHz in a battery-powered device, but top-end processors are still stuck in the 4GHz range (and that's 1GHz but we can ramp up for short periods nowadays, which is even weirder!). That's your warning.
If you're single-threading in this day and age your days are numbered. Likely you'll get thousands of 5GHz cores (limited as they may be) before you ever see a 10Ghz machine (if ever).
Sorry, but your graphs need work.
OTOH, even though Moore's law has hit a pause, that's happened before, and then a new technology showed up that reinstated it. The current problem with that happening is that local processing is sufficient for most current uses with current technology. Some new application will probably be needed to change that. It'll probably be called AI, but what will be meant by that is a bit unclear. One good candidate is self-driving cars. They would benefit immensely from smaller computers that were less power hungry. And there would be huge numbers of them sold.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It seems rather silly. It’s not a statement of some absolute scientific truth - nothing really depends on it holding true or not. If Moore’s Law stops being true, it’s not as if Intel or TSMC or Samsung is going to be shuttering factories because their fabs won’t work anymore. Jony Ive won’t descend into madness because he can’t make things any thinner. Nothing practical will actually change, and technological development will continue to progress.
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