Terahertz Transistors

NICK OSWALD ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING AT OKLAHOMA STATE UNIVERSITY

History
y 1947 first transistor  Created by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley  Point contact transistor  Semiconducting material Germanium  By early 1950s transistors made its way into electronics  Replaced vacuum tubes

Picture from: http://www.porticus.org/bell/belllabs_transistor.html

History Continued
y Integrated Circuit

1958 Jack Kilby  Combined electrical devices on a single chip



y Planar Technology

1958 Jean Horni  Created a transistor with a flat profile



y IC with Planar Technology

1959 Robert Noyce  Combined IC and Planar technology



Moores Law
y Published in

1965 by Gordon Moore



Has been extremely accurate to this point Inspired the progression of technology Has been used to predict the feature size and speed of transistors
Picture from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_Law#_note-0

Proposed THz Transistors

y Traditional Transistor But smaller features
  

December 2006 Milton Feng University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne August 2006 Quentin Diduck University of Rochester Many Different Designs June 2007 Yury A. Tarankanov and Jari M. Kinaret

y Ballistic Transistor
  

y Carbon Nanotube Field Effect Transistor (CNTFET)

  

Traditional Transistor with Smaller Feature size

y Switching Speeds  845 GHz when chilled to -55 C  765 GHz when at room temperature y Fastest Transistor when

proposed y Base Mesa

  

Old Design 1.5m New Design 550 nm Measured using an SEM image

Picture from http://www.news.uiuc.edu/NEWS/06/1211transistor.html

Ballistic Transistor
y Operation
   

0 or 1 based on the direction of flow Direction changes based on the field applied to the transistor Deflects electrons off a triangle Electrons flow in a plane Materials
indium gallium arsenide indium phosphide Gallium arsenide

y Characteristics


 

70nm feature size Use etching to create the triangle

Picture from http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/17368/?a=f

CNTFET
y Many different designs  Carbon nanotube ring
Semiconducting characteristics Conducting characteristics

Carbon nanotube cantilever

Single walled

nanotube structure (SWNT) Lying on a layer of Silicon dioxide Attached to the drain and source 2 separate designs using a metallic multi-walled nanotube structure (MWNT) acting as gate Doubly clamped Singly clamped

CNTFET continued
y SWNT  Length 1000nm  Diameter 1.7nm y MWNT  Doubly Clamped
Length 2000nm Support height 30nm

Singly Clamped
Length 1000nm Support height 40nm and

60nm Gate bar height 25nm and 40nm

Picture used from Yury A. Tarakanov, Jari M. Kinaret, A Carbon Nanotube Field Effect Transistor with a Suspended Nanotube Gate, Nano Letters, Vol. 7, No. 8, pp. 2291-2294, June 2007

Conclusions
y Moores Law is continuing to be an influence y Many new ideas for a THz transistor y Eventually a complete redesign of the transistor will

be necessary