Life after silicon
The huge increases in the power and capacity of computers, cell phones and communications networks in the last 40 years have been the result of ever-shrinking silicon transistors. But silicon transistors are now getting so small that they’re running up against fundamental physical limits: soon, it will be impossible to squeeze any better performance out of them. Researchers in MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories, led by professor of electrical engineering Jesus del Alamo, have been investigating whether transistors made from more exotic materials can keep the processing power coming. At the International Electron Devices Meeting this week in Baltimore — the premier conference on microelectronics — they are presenting four separate papers that offer cause for hope.Del Alamo’s group works with compound semiconductors, so called because, unlike silicon, they’re compounds of several other materials. In particular, the group works with materials that combine elements from columns III and V of the...