Electronic devices such as computers and smartphones continue to be thinner and smaller. One of the challenges for a thinner and smaller device in the future is to reduce the size of the components and internal hardware, and MIT has announced new progress that might allow 2D transistors for smaller microchip components. Researchers about this project believe that this breakthrough can help continue progress in the microchip market, allowing Moore’s law to continue.
Moore’s law predicts that the number of transistors packaged into the microchip can double every few years, but the physical limit starts to slow down that progress. MIT researchers are exploring the use of atomic thin ingredients, not silicon to make transistors. One of the main challenges to using 2D materials is to connect it to conventional electronic components has been difficult.
Researchers at MIT, University of California in Berkeley, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Companies, along with others, have found a way to make the electrical connection needed. Breakthrough can help bring the potential of 2D materials to the market and increase component miniaturization, thus expanding Moore’s law for the near future.
The researchers completed one of the biggest problems in miniaturizing semiconductor devices, which are contact resistance between metal electrodes and monolayer semiconductor materials. A researcher said the solution to the problem was relatively simple and needed a semi-metal element called BISMUT to take ordinary metal places to connect with monolayer materials.
Ultrathin monolayer material, such as molybdenum disulfide, has been seen as the possibility of traveling the miniaturization limit encountered by silicon-based transistor technology. Creating a very conductive interface between materials and metal conductors to connect them is a challenge. The fast rate for miniaturizing the transistor stopped around 2000, but the new developments broke the barrier in 2007. However, the researchers believed that we were on the edge of another bottleneck, but this new breakthrough could help push through.
