transistor tagged posts

If computer chips could be built from semiconductors just one atom thick, they could pack far more transistors into a smaller space while using lesspower. So far, however, the technology has been held back by the weakness of “p-type” transistors, which make up half of every modern chip.

In a new study published in Nature, researchers led by Vincent Tung at the University of Tokyo have shown that atom-thin sheets of boron carbon nitride (BCN) could offer a promising solution.

Transistor bottleneck
Today’s chips rely on two types of transistors working in pairs. In “n-type” transistors, electric current is carried by negatively charged electrons...

Inside every electronic device, the flow of electricity is controlled by a switch called a transistor. For decades, these switches were made from silicon. More recently, engineers have turned to a material called gallium nitride (GaN), which enables small, efficient devices like smartphone chargers.

However, at very high voltages, electric fields inside these transistors can concentrate at specific points, causing them to fail prematurely. As a result, today’s GaN devices still struggle to perform at the highest voltage levels achieved by silicon.

To overcome this limitation, researchers in the Power and Wide-band-gap Electronics Research Lab (POWERlab) in EPFL’s School of Engi...

In 2021, a team led by MIT physicists reported creating a new ultrathin ferroelectric material, or one where positive and negative charges separate into different layers. At the time, they noted the material’s potential for applications in computer memory and much more...

New material could make it possible to pack more transistors on a chip. When electrons move in a phosphorus transistor, they do so only in 2D. Thus black phosphorus could help engineers surmount one of the big challenges for future electronics: designing energy-efficient transistors. “Transistors work more efficiently when they are thin, with electrons moving in only two dimensions,” says a/Prof Szkopek, “Nothing gets thinner than a single layer of atoms.”

In 2004, physicists at the University of Manchester first isolated and explored graphene and now there are other 2D materials like black phosphorus, a form of phosphorus similar to graphite and can be separated easily into single atomic layers, ie phosphorene...