A team of scientists at Tyndall National Institute, UCC have made the world’s first junctionless transistor even smaller.
The transistor is the building block of the microchip. The development of the world’s first junctionless transistor by Tyndall’s Professor Jean-Pierre Colinge had already sparked off huge interest amongst the leading semiconductor manufacturers around the globe when it was published in Nature Nanotechnology.
The announcement was made as part of the programme of events taking place for Nanoweek which runs from 31st January to 4th February.
“The semiconductor industry was excited by the development of the junctionless transistor as it could represent simpler manufacturing processes of transistors. Considering that there are approximately 2 billion transistors on a single microprocessor, any improvement in the performance or structure of the transistor is always hugely significant for the semiconductor industry. Once we had developed the junctionless transistor our attention went towards making it even smaller. We have succeeded in making it at 50 nanometres, which is 20 times smaller than the transistors that were published in Nature Nanotechnology,” explains Professor Jean-Pierre Colinge, Tyndall National Institute.