NI CK OSWALD

ELECTRI CAL AND COMPUTER ENGI NEERI NG

AT OKLAHOMA STATE UNI VERSI TY
Terahertz Transistors
History
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
Integrated Circuit
1958 Jack Kilby
Combined electrical devices on a single chip
Planar Technology
1958 Jean Horni
Created a transistor with a flat profile
IC with Planar Technology
1959 Robert Noyce
Combined IC and Planar technology
Moores Law
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
Traditional Transistor But smaller features
December 2006
Milton Feng
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne
Ballistic Transistor
August 2006
Quentin Diduck
University of Rochester
Carbon Nanotube Field Effect Transistor (CNTFET)
Many Different Designs
June 2007
Yury A. Tarankanov and Jari M. Kinaret
Traditional Transistor with Smaller Feature size
Switching Speeds
845 GHz when chilled to -55 C
765 GHz when at room
temperature
Fastest Transistor when
proposed
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
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
Characteristics
Materials
indium gallium arsenide
indium phosphide
Gallium arsenide
70nm feature size
Use etching to create the triangle


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

CNTFET
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
SWNT
Length 1000nm
Diameter 1.7nm
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
Moores Law is continuing to be an influence
Many new ideas for a THz transistor
Eventually a complete redesign of the transistor will
be necessary