Anda di halaman 1dari 1

IET-UK International Conference on Information and Communication Technology in Electrical Sciences (ICTES 2007), Dr. M.G.R.

University, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. Dec. 20-22, 2007. pp.I-7.

VLSI BEYOND CMOS DEVICES: NANO, SINGLE ELECTRON AND SPINTRONIC DEVICES
Subir Kumar Sarkar
Department of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering Jadavpur University, Kolkata-700 032 Email: sksarkar@etce.jdvu.ac.in

The structural complexity of VLSI chip has been increasing at an exponential rate over the last thirty years. The phenomenal growth rate sustained primarily by the constant advances in manufacturing technology, as well as by the increasing need for integrating more complex functions on chip. Answering the needs of rapidly rising chip complexity has created significant challenges and aided the development of many areas, e.g. development of computer aided design (CAD) tools, chip design, fabrication, packaging, testing and reliability qualification. The main objective, however, remains device miniaturization. Device miniaturization results in reduced unit cost per function and in improved performance. As a result, the cost per bit of memory chips has almost halved every two years for successive generation of random access memories. Cost of logic ICs also have gone down. As device dimension decreases, the intrinsic switching time in MOSFETs deceases linearly, since the intrinsic delay is given approximately by the channel length divided by the carrier velocity. The device speed has improved by four orders of magnitude since 1960s. Higher speeds lead to expanded IC functional throughput rates. Another benefit of miniaturization is the reduction of power consumption. These possibilities have inspired the VLSI industry to look into the future with the vision of exploring different prospects, which are already in the offing. Due to size limitations, even with the scaling down, MOSFET technology cannot continue forever. It can hardly go beyond a few nanometers, even if adequate lithographical technology is available. As a consequence, the search for new principles of operation of the small size devices is becoming more and more important. The alternative devices are single electronics and spintronic devices. Each one of such devices have its own merits and demerits. We shall go through them gradually. With the development of semiconductor technology, it has recently become possible to fabricate laterally defined nanostructures, such as quantum wells, wires and dots. Properties of electrons in such structures have attracted a wide interest because of their importance both in physics and device applications. They quantum mechanically restrict the degrees of freedom of the conduction electrons to two, one or zero. This change in the effective dimensionality offers fascinating changes in electronic, magnetic, optical and vibrational properties.

I-7

Anda mungkin juga menyukai