Researchers have created the first-ever transistor made from silicene, the world's thinnest silicon material.
This new breakthrough could help scientists build smaller and more-efficient computer chips, the University of Texas at Austin's Cockrell School of Engineering. The material is only one-atom-thick and has spectacular electrical properties, but has been difficult to work with until this recent study.
"Apart from introducing a new player in the playground of 2-D materials, silicene, with its close chemical affinity to silicon, suggests an opportunity in the road map of the semiconductor industry," said Deji Akinwande, an assistant professor in the Cockrell School's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "The major breakthrough here is the efficient low-temperature manufacturing and fabrication of silicene devices for the first time."
The material has been so difficult to use in real world applications because of its extreme complexity and instability when exposed to air. To get around these roadblocks the researchers develop a new method for fabricating the silicene that reduces its exposure to air.
The novel method starts out with hot vapor silicon atoms that are condensed into a crystalline block of silver in a vacuum chamber. This forms a silicene sheet on a thin layer of silver and added a nanometer-thick layer of alumina. The resulting protective layers allowed the scientists to safely peel of the base and transfer it to an oxidized-silicon substrate. The team was then able to scrape away some of the silver, leaving behind two metal electrodes with a strip of silicone between them.
In the future the researchers plan to continue investigating the newly-achieved structure and method for producing it in hopes of eventually making low-energy, high-speed digital computer chips.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
