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Replacing silicon to reduce transistor size

06.12.2020

Silicon has been the dominant microchip material for decades, but its dominance may be ending. MIT researchers have found that an indium gallium arsenide alloy could be the basis for making smaller, more energy efficient transistors.

Transistors are the building blocks of computers. They act as switches, either interrupting the electric current, or allowing it to continue, and thereby ensure the operation of computers. However, in order for the growth of computer power not to stop, more compact transistors are needed. Today, semiconductor manufacturing is based on silicon, but there are alternatives. For example, indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs).

This material has excellent electron transport properties. InGaAs transistors can process signals quickly and operate at relatively low voltage, which means they can really improve the performance of computers. But there is one catch, writes MIT News. On a small scale, the famous electron transport of this compound is degraded. This problem has led some researchers to declare InGaAs an unsuitable material for transistor production.

However, the MIT scientists found that indium gallium arsenide's performance problems are due in part to oxide trapping, which makes it harder for electrons to pass through transistors.

After studying their frequency dependence - the speed at which electrical pulses travel through a transistor - they noticed that the performance of InGaAs drops at low frequencies. But at a frequency of 1 GHz or more, the connection works perfectly - no worse than silicon.

Scientists are confident that this problem can be solved or reduced to nothing, and they also hope that their discovery will spur new research on indium gallium arsenide.

Carbon nanotubes could be another alternative to silicon in field-effect transistors, but so far they have been produced in small quantities in laboratories. Specialists from the United States proposed a technology for creating CNFET on an industrial scale.

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