NWES

Home page

Company News

Industry Dynamics

2023

Smaller, Faster, More Energy Efficient, Semiconductor Chips Welcome Big Breakthroughs

Advanced electronic hardware has been "stretched thin" by the Big Data revolution, forcing engineers to rethink virtually every aspect of the microchip. As data sets become more complex to store, search, and analyze, these devices will have to become smaller, faster, and more energy efficient to keep up with the pace of data innovation.

One of the most interesting answers to this challenge is ferroelectric field effect transistors (FE-FETs). This is a field effect transistor with ferroelectric properties. It utilizes the non-volatile memory properties of ferroelectric materials and implantation and charge accumulation in them to achieve a long-term stable memory effect.

Compared with conventional memory, it has the advantages of low power consumption, high speed and high density. Therefore, a successful FE-FET design can significantly reduce the size and energy usage threshold of conventional devices and increase the speed.

Recently, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a new FE-FET design that demonstrates record-breaking performance in both computing and storage.

The design was recently debuted by Deep Jariwala, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE), and Kwan-Ho Kim, a Ph.D. candidate in his lab, and their results have been published in the journal Natural Nanotechnology.

The new transistor is said to cover the ferroelectric material aluminum scandium nitride (AlScN) with a two-dimensional semiconductor called molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), demonstrating for the first time that the two materials can be efficiently combined to create a transistor that is attractive for industrial manufacturing.

Because we've combined a ferroelectric insulator material with a 2D semiconductor, both are very energy efficient," Jariwala said. You can use them for computing and storage with high efficiency."

The device is said to be notable for its unprecedented thinness, allowing each individual device to operate with minimal surface area. Additionally, these miniature devices can be manufactured in large arrays scalable to industrial platforms.

"Our semiconductor (MoS2) is only 0.7 nanometers, and at first we weren't sure if it would be able to withstand the large amount of charge injected into it by our ferroelectric material, AlScN," said the researchers, "To our surprise, not only did they all resist, but the amount of charge the semiconductor could carry broke records. The amount of current the semiconductor could carry also broke records."

The researchers further explain that the more current a device can carry, the faster it can run in computing applications. The lower the resistance, the faster the memory can be accessed.

They also claim that the combination of MoS2 and AlScN is a real breakthrough in transistor technology. Other teams' FE-FETs have been hampered by the loss of ferroelectric properties due to the need to miniaturize the devices. Prior to this study, miniaturized FE-FETs had resulted in a significant reduction in the "memory window," affecting their overall performance.

Our new design uses 20 nm AlScN and 0.7 nm MoS2, and the FE-FETs reliably store data and enable fast access," the researchers said.

"The key is our ferroelectric material, AlScN, which, unlike many ferroelectric materials, retains its unique properties even when very thin. We demonstrated that it can maintain its unique ferroelectric properties at much thinner thicknesses (5 nanometers)." They added.

The team said their next step will be to focus on further miniaturization to produce devices that operate at sufficiently low voltages to be compatible with leading consumer device manufacturing.

"Our FE-FETs are very promising," Jariwala said. "With further development, these multifunctional devices could have a place in almost any technology you can think of, especially those that support artificial intelligence and consume, generate or process large amounts of data - from sensing to communications and more."