There’s good news in the search for the next generation of semiconductors.
Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley, have successfully integrated ultra-thin layers of the semiconductor indium arsenide onto a silicon substrate to create a nanoscale transistor with excellent electronic properties. A member of the III-V family of semiconductors, indium arsenide offers several advantages as an alternative to silicon including superior electron mobility and velocity, which makes it an outstanding candidate for future high-speed, low-power electronic devices.
“We’ve shown a simple route for the heterogeneous integration of indium arsenide layers down to a thickness of 10 nanometers on silicon substrates,” says Ali Javey, a faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley, who led this research.
“The devices we subsequently fabricated were shown to operate near the projected performance limits of III-V devices with minimal leakage current. Our devices also exhibited superior performance in terms of current density and transconductance as compared to silicon transistors of similar dimensions.”
For all its wondrous electronic properties, silicon has limitations that have prompted an intense search for alternative semiconductors to be used in future devices. Javey and his research group have focused on compound III-V semiconductors, which feature superb electron transport properties. The challenge has been to find a way of plugging these compound semiconductors into the well- established, low-cost processing technology used to produce today’s silicon-based devices. Given the large lattice mismatch between silicon and III-V compound semiconductors, direct hetero-epitaxial growth of III-V on silicon substrates is challenging and complex, and often results in a high volume of defects.
“We’ve demonstrated what we are calling an ‘XOI,’ or compound semiconductor-on-insulator technology platform, that is parallel to today’s ‘SOI,’ or silicon-on-insulator platform,” says Javey. “Using an epitaxial transfer method, we transferred ultrathin layers of single-crystal indium- arsenide on silicon/silica substrates, then fabricated devices using conventional processing techniques in order to characterize the XOI material and device properties.”