U.S. research team creates transistor with 1-nanometer gate

A research team at a U.S. government facility has created a transistor with a working 1-nanometer gate, breaking a major barrier, or a threshold, in transistor size among conventional semiconductors.

While the 5-nanometer threshold is set by the laws of physics, high-end 20-nanometer-gate transistors are now on the market. For comparison, a strand of human hair is about 50,000 nanometers thick.

"We made the smallest transistor reported to date," said Ali Javey, lead principal investigator of the Electronic Materials program in the Materials Science Division at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). "The gate length is considered a defining dimension of the transistor. We demonstrated a 1-nanometer-gate transistor, showing that with the choice of proper materials, there is a lot more room to shrink our electronics."

The development could be key to keeping alive Intel Corp co-founder Gordon Moore' s prediction that the density of transistors on integrated circuits would double every two years, enabling the increased performance of our laptops, mobile phones, televisions, and other electronics. "The semiconductor industry has long assumed that any gate below 5 nanometers wouldn't work, so anything below that was not even considered," said Sujay Desai, a graduate student in Javey's lab and lead author of a paper published this week in the journal Science.

"This research shows that sub-5-nanometer gates should not be discounted," Desai was quoted as saying by a Berkeley Lab news release.

The key was to use carbon nanotubes and molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), which is part of a family of materials with immense potential for applications in LEDs, lasers, nanoscale transistors, solar cells, and more.

Transistors consist of three terminals: a source, a drain, and a gate. Current flows from the source to the drain, and that flow is controlled by the gate, which switches on and off in response to the voltage applied. Both silicon and MoS2 have a crystalline lattice structure, but electrons flowing through silicon are lighter and encounter less resistance compared with MoS2. That is a boon when the gate is 5 nanometers or longer. But below that length, a quantum mechanical phenomenon called tunneling kicks in, and the gate barrier is no longer able to keep the electrons from barging through from the source to the drain terminals.

"This means we can't turn off the transistors," explained Desai. "The electrons are out of control."

Because electrons flowing through MoS2 are heavier, their flow can be controlled with smaller gate lengths. MoS2 can also be scaled down to atomically thin sheets, about 0.65 nanometers thick, with a lower dielectric constant, a measure reflecting the ability of a material to store energy in an electric field. Both of these properties, in addition to the mass of the electron, help improve the control of the flow of current inside the transistor when the gate length is reduced to 1 nanometer.

Once the researchers settled on MoS2 as the semiconductor material, it was time to construct the gate. Making a 1-nanometer structure, it turns out, is no small feat. Conventional lithography techniques do not work well at that scale, so they turned to carbon nanotubes, hollow cylindrical tubes with diameters as small as 1 nanometer. They then measured the electrical properties of the devices to show that the MoS2 transistor with the carbon-nanotube gate effectively controlled the flow of electrons.

"This work demonstrated the shortest transistor ever," said Javey, who is also a University of California, Berkeley, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences. "However, it's a proof of concept. We have not yet packed these transistors onto a chip, and we haven't done this billions of times over. We also have not developed self-aligned fabrication schemes for reducing parasitic resistances in the device. But this work is important to show that we are no longer limited to a 5-nanometer gate for our transistors."

"Moore's Law can continue a while longer by proper engineering of the semiconductor material and device architecture," he claimed. Endit