With Great Power, Comes Quantum Tunneling Transistors

Some would say, a poor battery life is a bigger drawback than what a Quad-Core processor would have to offer, but why can't we have the best of both worlds? Oh yes, we can. Hail, Researchers from Penn State and epitaxial wafer maker IQE, who have created a high performance transistor that fixes the problem of high power consumption in mobile and tablet devices.

Portable systems are traditionally built on MOSFET (metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors) technology, which drag a supply voltage of 1 volt to turn on. The MOSFET architecture does not allow any fiddling that would reduce power consumption owing to physical laws but power demand isn't going to get any lesser with next-generation devices aggregating into one computer chip.

 

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The way around this limitation was devised by doctoral candidate Dheeraj Mohata from Penn state who delivered a paper on this topic at the International Electron Devices Meeting in Washington DC on December 7th.  The paper supports the fabrication of a heterojunction field effect tunnel transistor with a 650% increase in drive current.

Two dissimilar semiconductors were used for this purpose which were engineered to work Tunneling FETs. Tunneling FETs use the quantum mechanical property in which electrons are able to pass through a physical barrier if the barrier is thin enough. This increased the drive current, providing on-off functions at 300mV instead of 1 V, enhancing the power savings by 70%. This phenomenal reduce in power demand is irrespective of whether transistors are idle or switching.

 

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