Demo unlocks Moore’s Law
R. Colin Johnson, EETimes
7/13/2017 00:01 AM EDT
LAKE WALES, Fla. — Designers can extend Moore's Law scaling beyond the 5-nanometer node by choosing two-dimensional anisotropic (faster with the grain) materials such as monolayers of black phosphorus, according to Imec (Leuven, Belgium). Researchers from the nonprofit semiconductor research institute described their findings at the annual Imec Technology Forum, held in San Francisco on the eve of Semicon West (July 11-13).
Imec’s demonstration project focused on field-effect transistors for high-performance logic applications as part of its Core CMOS program. Using co-optimization at the material, device, and circuit levels, Imec and its collaborators proved the concept using 2-D monolayers of anisotropic black phosphorus with a smaller effective mass in the transport direction. The black phosphorus was sandwiched between interfacial layers of low-k dielectric, with stacked dual gates deployed atop high-k dielectrics to control the atomically thin channels.