We present novel multifunctional nanocircuits built from nanowire transistors that uniquely feature equal electron and hole conduction. Thereby, the mandatory requirement to yield energy efficient circuits with a single type of transistor is shown for the first time. Contrary to any transistor reported up to date, regardless of the technology and semiconductor materials employed, the dually active silicon nanowire channels shown here exhibit an ideal symmetry of current-voltage device characteristics for electron (n-type) and hole (p-type) conduction as evaluated in terms of comparable currents, turn-on threshold voltages, and switching slopes. The key enabler to symmetry is the selective tunability of the tunneling transmission of charge carriers as rendered by the combination of the nanometer-scale dimensions of the junctions and the application of radially compressive strain. To prove the advantage of this concept we integrated dually active transistors into cascadable and multifunctional one-dimensional circuit strings. The nanocircuits confirm energy efficient switching and can further be electrically configured to provide four different types of operation modes compared to a single one when employing conventional electronics with the same amount of transistors.
Germanium is a promising material for future very large scale integration transistors, due to its superior hole mobility. However, germanium-based devices typically suffer from high reverse junction leakage due to the low band-gap energy of 0.66 eV and therefore are characterized by high static power dissipation. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate a solution to suppress the off-state leakage in germanium nanowire Schottky barrier transistors. Thereto, a device layout with two independent gates is used to induce an additional energy barrier to the channel that blocks the undesired carrier type. In addition, the polarity of the same doping-free device can be dynamically switched between p- and n-type. The shown germanium nanowire approach is able to outperform previous polarity-controllable device concepts on other material systems in terms of threshold voltages and normalized on-currents. The dielectric and Schottky barrier interface properties of the device are analyzed in detail. Finite-element drift-diffusion simulations reveal that both leakage current suppression and polarity control can also be achieved at highly scaled geometries, providing solutions for future energy-efficient systems.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.