In an impressive stride toward more energy-efficient electronics, MIT researchers have developed a form of three-dimensional transistor that sidesteps the energy limits of traditional silicon transistors. MIT News reports that these new devices, constructed from ultrathin semiconductor materials, boast the ability to operate on significantly lower voltages, offering similar performance to their silicon counterparts and potentially supplanting them in future electronics applications.
Yanjie Shao, an MIT postdoc and the leading voice behind the research, points out a key advantage of the new technology: "This is a technology with the potential to replace silicon, so you could use it with all the functions that silicon currently has, but with much better energy efficiency." As explained in their paper, the transistors utilize a quantum mechanical trick called quantum tunneling to loosen electrons through a barrier, rather than over it, allowing for efficient low-voltage operation that was holding silicon back by the so-called "Boltzmann tyranny."
These transistors aren't just about efficiency; they also pave the way for miniaturization. By creating vertical nanowires just a few nanometers wide – which the researchers believe may be the smallest 3D transistors to date – they can be densely packed onto chips to enhance computing power while maintaining energy efficiency. Notably, these advances were made possible by the meticulous capabilities of MIT.nano, the university's cutting-edge nanoscale research facility.
"We are really into single-nanometer dimensions with this work. Very few groups in the world can make good transistors in that range. Yanjie is extraordinarily capable to craft such well-functioning transistors that are so extremely small," Jesús del Alamo, the Donner Professor of Engineering in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, articulated the technical prowess required for such innovation. According to MIT's findings, their devices have exceeded the performance of similar tunneling transistors by about 20 times. Despite the exceptional engineering involved, there remain challenges to uniformity at such infinitesimal scales. A mere 1-nanometer discrepancy can lead to substantial variation in electron behavior, which the team seeks to mitigate in future advancements.
