The toughest thing about the semiconductor industry is that Moore's Law is coming to an end. Researchers have to look for alternatives to silicon to improve semiconductor performance. Carbon nanotubes are considered one of the most likely alternatives to silicon.
Recently, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has made a breakthrough in the development of this material. The school's materials scientists have successfully developed a 1-inch-sized carbon nano-transistor, and for the first time exceeded both the performance of silicon transistors and GaAs transistor.
As the name implies, carbon nano-transistors are transistors made from carbon nanotubes as a channel conductive material. The wall of the tube is only one atom thick. This material not only has good conductivity, but also can be 100 times smaller than current silicon transistors. . In addition, the ultra-small space of a carbon nano-transistor allows it to rapidly change the direction of the current flowing through it, thus achieving a speed five times that of a Silicon Transistor or only one-fifth the power consumption of a silicon transistor.
However, due to technical bottlenecks, researchers have not been able to develop carbon nanotube transistors with better performance than silicon transistors and gallium arsenide transistors for a long period of time, and they do not expect to use them in various electronic devices.
It is understood that according to the traditional practice, carbon nanotubes are usually mixed with some metal nanotubes, but these metal nanotubes will cause short circuits in electronic devices, thereby destroying the conductive properties of carbon nanotubes. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, took a different approach this time. They used polymers to replace almost all metal nanotubes, reducing the content of metal nanotubes to less than 0.01%, which greatly enhanced the conductivity.
In addition, the research team also made improvements in the process, and they developed a dissolution method that successfully removed the residue generated during the manufacture of carbon nanotubes.
Mike Arnold, professor of materials engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said: "Our research has overcome multiple obstacles faced by carbon nanotubes, and we have finally obtained the first-in-class carbon nano-transistors with the first super-performance silicon transistors. It still needs to be realized, but we have finally achieved catch-up after 20 years.”
So the question is, who will become the next generation of semiconductor materials, graphene and carbon nanotubes?
