Researchers Excited Over First Silicene Transistor, What's It Mean for Computing?

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

World's thinnest silicon material could lead to faster significantly faster computer chips

It's not quite the Holy Grail of computing, though the creation of a silicene transistor has researchers at The University of Texas at Austin's Cockrell School of Engineering giddy because it's never been done before. In fact, human-made silicene was just a theoretical material up until seven years ago due to its complexity and instability when exposed to air. Now we have the first silicene transistor, and with it comes the potential for far faster and more energy efficient computer chips.
That's getting a bit ahead of ourselves. Silicene transistors are more of a proof of concept at this early stage, as they only last a few minutes. But it's also significant because it erases the question of whether silicene could even be made into a transistor in the first place.
"Nobody could have expected that in such a short time, something that didn’t exist could make a transistor," Guy Le Lay, a materials scientist at Aix-Marseille University in France and one of the first scientists to create silicene in a lab, told Nature Nanotechnology.
Part of Le Lay's interest in silicene is due to growing skepticism that graphene is a suitable material for semiconductors. That's because graphene lacks a band gap, which is an energy hurdle that electrons must jump before they can carry a current. Band gaps are what allow semiconductor devices to switch on and off and perform logic operations on bits.
Silicene doesn't suffer the same shortfall, though there are other challenges, namely the fabrication process. To get around some of the challenges, Deji Akinwande, a nanomaterials researcher, teamed with Alessandro Molle at the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems in Agrate Brianza, Italy, to develop a new fabrication method, one that reduces silicene's exposure to air.
It consists of letting a hot vapor of silicon adoms condense onto a crystalline block of silver in a vacuum chamber. Afterwards, the researchers formed a silicene sheet on a thin layer of silver and added a layer of alumina measuring just five nanometers on top. These protective layers allowed the team to peel the silicene off its base and lay it on an oxidized-silcon substrate with the silver side up. The last step involves scraping away some of the silver, leaving behind two islands of metal as electrodes, along with strip of silicene between them.
Unfortunately, the exposed silicene degrades in as little as two minutes, though an extra layer on top of the silicene transistor is one possible way to extend its life. Nevertheless, it's still a long ways from being used in actual computer chips.
Image Credit: The University of Texas at Austin
Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook


More...