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Product category: Analogue and Mixed Signal ICs
News Release from: Texas Instruments (April 2001-March 2006)
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 15 December 2003

Single electron transistor advances revealed

Texas Instruments is working in conjunction with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne to find ways to use single electron transistors to perform logic functions

Texas Instruments, working in conjunction with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne, has described a potential way to use single electron transistors (SETs) to perform logic functions and dramatically reduce the size and power consumption of future semiconductor devices. A paper presented at the prestigious International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) showed that a combination of SETs and standard CMOS transistors can provide enough gain and current drive to perform logic functions at a much smaller scale than will eventually be possible with CMOS alone.

SETs can potentially take the industry all the way to the theoretical limit of electrons for computing applications by allowing the use of a single electron to represent a logic state.

'Looking out ten years and beyond, TI sees that the CMOS roadmap will need help to continue to deliver the predictable returns the industry has counted on for decades from Moore's Law', said Christoph Wasshuber, a Texas Instruments scientist and co-author of the paper.

'It is starting to look viable for CMOS to continue to play a major role by providing a traditional system interface to millions of radically smaller, lower power, single electron transistors'.

There is general agreement in the semiconductor industry that standard silicon CMOS should support scaling for the next ten to fifteen years using traditional field effect transistors (FETs) that use large numbers of electrons in operation.

Advancement beyond that will require vastly different approaches in materials and architecture to cost effectively manage the signal integrity and heat problems created by so many tightly packed transistors.

A range of alternative state devices have shown promise, but the light, fast and strongly interacting 'charged electron' provided the foundation of modern computing.

Simulations are expected to show very encouraging results and will address random background charges, an obstacle that had effectively stopped major research on SETs, by using a modulation technique that takes advantage of the periodic current voltage characteristic of SETs.

The next challenge for researchers is to manufacture reliably many SETs in a CMOS compatible process on silicon.

The first application for SETs could be for memory and special applications in metrology, such as primary thermometers and supersensitive electrometers.

TI closely links its chip design with advanced process technology development to manufacture products competitive with any company in the world.

By offering a variety of optimised process flows for each step on its technology roadmap, TI provides the best performance for different end equipment requirements.

Adjustments to the transistors' gate length, threshold voltage, gate oxide thickness or bias conditions all change the performance specification of the millions of transistors on the final integrated circuit.

The different flows are carefully targeted to achieve a specific application balance between transistor performance and power consumption, providing customers a range of product options.

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