Emerging Devices for Electronics and Beyond

As evidenced in the preceding chapter, electronics continues to evolve. Indeed, as described in the introduction of  Chap. 1 the field has been evolving and changing since its inception: From the first electromechanical/chemical devices in the early ninet

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Emerging Devices for Electronics and Beyond

“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” W. E. Disney

As evidenced in the preceding chapter, electronics continues to evolve. Indeed, as described in the introduction of Chap. 1 the field has been evolving and changing since its inception: From the first electromechanical/chemical devices in the early nineteenth century to the introduction of vacuum tube devices at the beginning of the twentieth century, and on to modern solid-state electronics and the integrated circuit of today. As the integrated circuit advances toward its final level of maturity, electronics appears to be approaching yet another important crossroad in the first part of the twenty-first century. What lies beyond may be as drastic as the change, for example, in going from vacuum tubes to solid-state devices. Although it is difficult to predict the precise path electronics will take, the tremendous success of silicon planar processing is also enabling emerging devices and applications in diverse areas beyond traditional electronics that are already beginning to make an impact. This chapter discusses aspects of solid-state electronics moving forward in the near term (toward 2020/25) and some of the other emerging applications and extensions of this technology that are being developed.

5.1

Nanoelectronics

Electronics based on silicon MOSFETs has been scaled to nanoscale1 dimensions, as discussed in Chap. 4. As scaling reduces device dimensions even further, silicon nanoelectronics will continue to be refined along with other materials to create deep 1 The most common definition of the nanoscale is 1–100 nm. In this book, any device structure that has nanoscale extent in one or more spatial dimensions is considered a nanostructure.

C. Papadopoulos, Solid-State Electronic Devices: An Introduction, Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-8836-1_5, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

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5 Emerging Devices for Electronics and Beyond

Fig. 5.1 Thin silicon channel used for FD-SOI structures. In this example an 8 nm layer of Si is used on top of a 10 nm buried oxide layer (After C. Fenouillet-Beranger et al., Solid-State Electron. 54, 849 (2010))

nanoscale ICs over the next 10–15 years. In parallel with these developments, other types of nanoscale devices based on novel/different operating principles that provide potential advantages “beyond CMOS” (Si-based or otherwise) are beginning to appear. We cover each of these two broad areas in turn below.

5.1.1

Continued (MOSFET) Scaling2

Both planar and multi-gate MOSFET structures are being developed further as device dimensions approach the 10 nm level:

5.1.1.1

Si Nanoelectronics

In terms of silicon-on-insulator (SOI) devices, an additional enhancement is so-called fully depleted SOI (FD-SOI). Here, a very thin (~5–10 nm) Si layer is used for the channel as shown in Fig. 5.1. In FD-SOI the silicon channel is fully dep

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