Researchers Create 22nm Indium Gallium Arsenide Transistors
Indium gallium arsenide is gaining traction as a potential successor of silicon in semiconductors.
Following a 20 nm transistor announcement from Purdue University, researchers at MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories said they successfully created a 22 nm indium gallium arsenide compound transistor.
As semiconductor manufacturing processes transition to smaller structures, researchers believe that Silicon will eventually hit a limit at which it cannot be scaled anymore. Indium gallium arsenide is considered a potential candidate to replace silicon at the 10 nm and below level. MIT said that the material is already used in fiber-optic communication and radar technologies, and is known to have extremely good electrical properties. Recent successes to shrink transistors using the compound suggest that the industry is working toward a viable solution. The 10 nm mark is expected to be reached and surpassed in semiconductor manufacturing in the 2017/2018 time frame.
"We have shown that you can make extremely small indium gallium arsenide MOSFETs with excellent logic characteristics, which promises to take Moore's Law beyond the reach of silicon," said Jesús del Alamo, co-developer of the transistors.
The researchers said that many of the techniques used to make the indium gallium arsenide transistors are in use in current silicon-based chip manufacturing. Even if the techniques have not been used for compounds, del Alamo believes that current production technologies need to be adopted.
"When you are talking about integrating billions of tiny transistors onto a chip, then we need to completely reformulate the fabrication technology of compound semiconductor transistors to look much more like that of silicon transistors," del Alamo said.
He said that the team will now be focusing on improving the electrical performance of their transistors, and further shrink the transistor gate length down to 10 nm.
Besides, Graphene was stated to be ideal to go lower than 10nm.
The only reason we are seeing talks of this kind of reduction NOW is because its cheaper than it was over a decade ago from a $$ point of view, even though we had the technology and resources to do it back then - it just wasn't 'cost friendly').
Money is slowing all of this down on the commercial end - its disgusting.
Does that mean its electrical performance isn't on par with silicon yet? Or, unspecified?
What's wrong with making the electrical performance better than silicon?
Anyway, question for anyone, can this chip material be recycled from older chips to make newer chips?
If you can't convince investors that you can make a marketable product, then tough luck.
There are some technologies that need decades of research before it's marketable, such as Li-ion batteries or LCDs.
moral of the story: marketing and planned release of superior tech all to get the most out of us - the consumer.
maybe I'm wrong but it all seems way too convenient.
there are 2 things at work here;
1) revolutionary releases are bad for everyone. They take consumers by suprise which pisses off those who just purchase a product and will now no longer have 'the best', and it makes people purchase defensively rather than when they want to purchase. On the business side it makes for 'feast and famine' markets rather than a steady income stream, which makes it a lot harder to budget resources on long term projects. Slow, steady, and predictable releases are good for everyone, and Intel is king of that. We already know quite a bit about the next 4 gens of processors coming from Intel over the next 4-5 years. With AMD you simply never know until a month before, and even then you don't know what to expect from it until 'the next OS release fixes it'. Businesses and consumers would buy AMD if they simply knew what AMD was going to do ahead of time, even if they were not the fastest or best deal around, so long as they can plan their upgrade cycle around it then they would be happy.
The exception to this rule is if you can come out with a revolutionary product every year, which is what Apple was doing with Jobs. But this is mostly a matter of marketing so the consumer feels good about each release, but without actuially getting something all-together better than the previous release. Then when a truly revolutionary release does come (like the last iPad), then it pisses everyone off.
2) It is a shift of focus from Intel. With the Pentium 4 Intel was focused on clock speed. They ditched the really great P6 architecture to move to NetBurst specifically to focus on clock speed, and they lost horribly to AMD who showed that you can go much faster with better design than raw horse power. Because of this we saw Intel move from 180nm to 90nm over a 6 year period (00-05), while the die size increased dramatically to some rather huge chips. Then (finally) in '06 Intel's brain turned on and they decided to focus on efficiency. They went back to the P6 core architecture (a glorified Pentium 3), bringing with it all of what they had learned the last 6 years and they found that they could get a sub 2GHz cpu to beat their old 4GHz processors. So the focus was then on core efficiency, which is why we have gone from 65nm to 22nm over the last 6 years, and if you exclude the iGPU then the core CPU is taking extremely small amounts of power compared to the old design.
But just like the GHz wall that was hit before, now we are fast aproaching the nm wall. There is already talk about delays of Broadwell (14nm) due to manufacture problems, so a new paradigm needs to be focused on. Be it materials, or architecture design and extensions, or something else entirely, who knows. But do not mistake a company's obsession with a single focus (GHz or die shrinks) to saying that a company is 'out to get you' or any such silliness. It is true that they are holding back just enough to keep a steady stream of buyers coming to their door, but they are also doing it because they do not have enough innovation to make something amazing every year. If they did, you could bet they would put it to market to fight off the ARM invasion which will be hitting desktops and laptops in the next year or two.
Creating such small structures with eletrically-functional characteristics using InGaAs instead of Si is impressive.
Personally, I'd prefer that research head in the carbon molecule direction (grapheme, nanotube, diamonds, whatever) than go with InGaAs (or even just GaAs). In spite of the little ghost-buster trash can logo on most electronics packaging, most electronics still make their way to landfills and I don't relish the idea of Indium, Gallium and Arsenic making their way into our water supplies.
@deksman: Have you finished your homework assignment yet? As an alternative, you could always try something like crowdfunding.