A team of scientists at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory have created an ultrathin transistor unlike any current design. Instead of larger 3-D layers of semiconductors, as in a traditional version, the new transistor is made from a layer of atomically thin semiconductor topped by a sheet of molecular crystal.
It runs on a fundamentally different principle than traditional transistors, using a phenomenon called charge localization, which had before only been achieved in materials that were cryogenically cooled to extremely low temperatures. The team’s new transistors, however, can run at room temperature.
Their entire system is only four atoms thick, and the scientists measured its performance comparable to very good traditional transistors.
“This transistor behaves very differently from a conventional transistor, and it gives rise to a lot of interesting properties that conventional transistors do not have,” said Mengyu Gao, a postdoctoral fellow at UChicago and first author on the study, published in Science ("Room-temperature charge localization in ion-coupled bilayer transistors").
The researchers hope the findings will open new avenues for technology, including in microelectronics and computing, but also power new fundamental discovery of the laws of nature.
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