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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."
This reminds me of what happened with NAND (i.e. flash memory) a few years ago. Ever-smaller transistors hit a wall due to endurance problems (each one could only be reprogrammed a few hundred/thousand times), so they went back to larger transistors but started stacking them into layers. Now we're at ~96 layers, and it's expected that a few thousand layers is feasible.
The problem with layering in CPUs is how hot each layer gets, and adding new layers is unlikely to help single-core performance beyond what cache can do. So, we're going to end up with low-clockspeed (to minimize heat) thousand-core CPUs... which will actually be perfect for GPUs, not so much for that single-threaded productivity task. I could also see this being used for HBM, which is already stacked.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
They mean moving from 2D to 3D chips.
>"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... "
And what about when not at room temperature? Seems like that little disclaimer could be what makes the whole thing impractical. A chip/board isn't going to be made up of ONLY these "metal-air" transistors, so it is going to generate a significant amount of heat or be near something that does. Plus, there is the overall environment in which the device will be used that needs to be considered. The article doesn't elaborate on this at all.
Home user already have professional-grade appliances now (they just don't know how to use it)
Why do Slashdot editors insist on making headlines into questions that aren't answered in the article? A headline is a super-short summary the story. The story isn't a question, so the headline shouldn't be, either.
The story is, "Researchers believe new metal-air transistors could continue Moore's Law". It isn't a debate on this belief of those researchers.
Oh, wait - this is a click bait tactic used to make something seem more interesting than it really is...
what's a brand stamp?
It's like a tramp stamp, but made with fire.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
There are plenty of areas in personal tech that could certainly use a huge jump in speed and/or density.
Virtual reality, for example - a tenfold (or more) increase in graphics processing power would make personal VR amazing instead of just fun. Standalone setups like the Oculus Go could have 4k-per-eye graphics, with high frame rate and roomscale tracking.
That was my very first thought. Except it's not vaccuum. Of course neither were vaccum tubes. You had to lower the pressure to increase the mean free path. But if you could make this small enough then you could just do it right in the air. And by going to high fields you get to replace therm ionic emitters with field effect emitters. So less heat. And again to get high fields at low voltage you need to go small.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The answer is that soon the Internet will be running on a series of tubes.
Moore's law is an observation about being able to reduce feature size via photolithography.
No, it isn't. It's an observation about the number of gates. It doesn't matter whether you decrease the feature size, or increase the number of layers, or just make a bigger die. All of these, of course, have happened over the years.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Power consumption too! It's a major factor in a lot of designs today. This means fewer batteries, and less recharging or replacement. I'm working on stuff that needs a 20 year life out of a single small battery, and some that need to survive off of a capacitor for a few minutes after a power outage. The consumer oriented model of recharging nightly or constantly buying new batteries deserves to become a thing of the past.
Professional may also mean more security features, more customization, and so forth. These days professional may even mean less advertising and spying (which today are the same thing). It could mean less quality variance over temperature and age (similar to industrial quality), and there are some consumer products that just don't work well if left in the sun on a hot day.
At a previous job we used compact flash for our device storage on a medical device. It was amazing how lower quality those things were when intended for mass market consumers, and things like "16x" speed wasn't even a standardized term. It took time to find one of them that came with an actual data sheet and that did the job as advertised.
Moore's Law potentially has a long way to run - because semiconductors are still only a few layers thick in the Z axis and there are a lot more doublings left before we're dealing with "chips" that are solid circuitry feet on a side. Non vacuum "vacuum tubes" are far less sensitive to high temperatures than semiconductors, so building 3-D structures of them won't have as much of a cooling problem. (You still need to dissipate all the heat, but you can let the structure get 'way hotter to encourage it to migrate out.)
Single Threading speed may be falling off its free ride on Moore's Law-like exponential scaling, as speed-of-light and electron-size leakage limits raise a wall. (Going 3-D will help some, by shortening paths, but not by a lot.) But lots of really useful computations are massively parallelizable. The should drive continued manufacture and deployment of higher-switch-count devices as the technology is developed and yields are brought up.
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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.
#DeleteChrome
Virtual reality is a real possibility, but they've got to resolve the vestibular canal disagreeing with the eyes about what's happening first, so people don't get nauseous. Some people can deal with it, but most can't without a lot of training, and some never can. And among those who can, a lot don't want to. Sea sickness isn't pleasant.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Alas, modern small high speed transistors are not zero static power consumption. It's a substantial problem that plays a part in the speed versus power tradeoffs.
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Not so much similar as identical to vacuum tubes (or valves as we call them this side of the pond). It's just that the scale is so small you can let the air in without stopping the flow of electrons.
I guess computers will now be not only smaller, faster and sexier computers, but also sound warmer with more detail. All we need now is the miniature green felt tip pen :-)