Innovative Thermal Emitter Transistor A Breakthrough in Semiconductor Technology
TapTechNews August 15th news, according to the official news of the Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences today, the research team of the Shenyang National Research Center for Materials Sciences of the Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Peking University cooperated and adopted an innovative idea to improve the current density by controllably modulating hot carriers, invented a thermal emitter transistor composed of mixed-dimensional materials such as graphene and germanium, and proposed a brand-new stimulated emission hot carrier generation mechanism.
This research result was published in the journal Nature on August 15th with the title A hot-emitter transistor based on stimulated emission of heated carriers (a thermal emitter transistor based on controllable stimulated emission of carriers). .
According to the introduction, this new type of transistor is composed of two coupled graphene/germanium Schottky junctions (as shown in Figure 1). When the device is working, carriers are injected from the graphene base electrode, and then diffuse to the emitter electrode and excite the carriers heated by the electric field, resulting in a sharp increase in current. This design achieves a subthreshold swing of less than 1 mV/dec (as shown in Figure 2), breaking the Boltzmann limit (60mV/dec) of traditional transistors. In addition, this transistor also shows a negative differential resistance with a peak-to-valley current ratio of more than 100 at room temperature (as shown in Figure 3), showing its application potential in multi-valued logic computing (as shown in Figure 4).
The official of the Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences said that this research has opened up a new field in transistor device research, added a new member to the family of hot carrier transistors, and is expected to promote its wide application in future low-power, multi-functional integrated circuits.
This research work was led by researcher Liu Chi, researcher Sun Dongming and academician Cheng Huiming of the Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and coopera ted with the team of Ren Wencai and the team of Zhang Linning of Peking University.
In the research process, researcher Liu Chi of the Institute of Metal Research designed the device and circuit and proposed the device mechanism.
Doctoral student Wang Xinzhe, master student Yang Xuqi, Kong Yue and Liang Yan of the Analysis and Testing Center jointly carried out the research on the preparation and performance testing of the device.
Researcher Ma Laipeng and others were responsible for the design and preparation of graphene materials.
Professor Zhang Linning of the Shenzhen Graduate School of Peking University and his doctoral student Shen Cong carried out the research on device simulation and modeling.
TapTechNews learned that Liu Chi, Wang Xinzhe, Shen Cong and Ma Laipeng are the co-first authors of the paper, and Liu Chi, Zhang Linning and Sun Dongming are the co-corresponding authors.
This research work was supported by multiple funds, including the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National Key R & D Program, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Liaoning Provincial Department of Science and Technology, the Institute of Metal Research and the Shenyang National Research Center for Materials Sciences.
TapTechNews attaches the paper link as follows:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07785-3