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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."
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.
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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