14 DAY TRIAL // A group of investigators from the United Kingdom announce that they were able to use one of the newest materials in the world to develop a transistor that features an on/off switching ratio 1,000 times higher than any other currently available on the market.
The team, based at the University of Southampton, used the 2D carbon compound called graphene to create the new transistors. This material features a host of chemical and physical properties that make it uniquely qualified to underly the next generation of electronic devices.
According to investigators, the record high-switching performances that their new transistors are currently recording makes them suitable for a wide array of applications, including electronic devices in future PDA, laptops, tablet computers, personal music players and so on.
Details of how the team – based at the USouthampton School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) – used graphene for the innovative components will appear in the February 3 issue of the esteemed scientific journal Electronics Letters.
The ECS Nano Research Group team, led by expert Dr Zakaria Moktadir, says that the reason why their new transistors are so efficient lies within their unique, nanoscale channel structure. Creating this type of indentations on silicon at this scale would be close to impossible.
“CMOS (Silicon Complementary Metal-Oxide- Semiconductor) downscaling is reaching its limits and we need to find a suitable alternative,” the team leader reveals.
“Other researchers had looked at graphene as a possibility, but found that one of the drawbacks was that graphene’s intrinsic physical properties make it difficult to turn off the current flow,” he adds.
What the scientist did was figure our a method of turning current off efficiently. He developed an approach that can be used in bilayer graphene nanowires, and which revolves around doping the material with geometrical singularities.
In other words, introducing bends and corners in graphene makes it very easy to shut off the current passing through the honeycomb-structured material, AlphaGalileo reports. The result is the new graphene field effect transistors (GFET).
“Enormous effort has been made across the world to pinch off the channel of GFET electrostatically, but the existing approaches require either the channel width to be much narrower than 10 nm or a very high voltage to be applied vertically across bilayer graphene layers,” says Hiroshi Mizuta.
“This hasn’t achieved an on/off ratio which is high enough, and is not viable for practical use,” says the professor, who is also the leader of the ECS Nano Research Group.