These Transistors Are Atomically Awesome

The development of high-performance alternatives to silicon in microelectronics has been brought nearer by researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa who stretched an oxide material at an atomic level, thus controlling its conductivity. They said this is a “milestone advancement towards making efficient switches, which are the basic building blocks of computer chips.”

Researchers in the Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering have been able to control an emerging material that they regard as a possible future alternative to silicon (opens in a new tab) in microelectronics. This is a timely development, because scientists and engineers face challenges in continuing the transistor shrinking trend – an important driver of computer chip performance. They published their findings in the journal Advanced Functional Materials under the title “Bandwidth Control and Symmetry Breaking in a Mott-Hubbard Correlated Metal.”