TEMPE, Ariz.-Motorola Labs said it has built the world’s thinnest functional transistor using a class of perovskite materials that will enable future transistors to be smaller and faster while consuming less power.
Perovskites are a class of crystalline oxide materials with unique material properties, Motorola Labs said.
“As devices continue to shrink in size, the gate oxide of the transistor also needs to become thinner,” said Jim Prendergast, vice president and general manager of Motorola’s Physical Sciences Research Lab. “However, we are quickly reaching the limit where we can no longer thin the silicon dioxide which has been used as a gate insulator for 30 years. The solution is to use a new family of materials that appear electrically to be much smaller than their actual physical thickness.”
The new transistors have an effective thickness three-to-four times thinner than those built with traditional semiconductor materials like silicon dioxide, and Motorola Labs said it has demonstrated electrical properties more than 10 times better.
