Physical limits of silicon transistors and circuits

Abstract

A discussion on transistors and electronic computing including some history introduces semiconductor devices and the motivation for miniaturization of transistors. The changing physics of field-effect transistors and ways to mitigate the deterioration in performance caused by the changes follows. The limits of transistors are tied to the requirements of the chips that carry them and the difficulties of fabricating very small structures. Some concluding remarks about transistors and limits are presented.

Increasing the Transistor Count by Constructing A Two-Layer Crystal Square on A Single Chip

“…Increasing the size of a CPU and the number of transistors will be limited due to the following limitation [6,7,8,9]:…”

A Review of New Characterization Methodologies of Gate Dielectric Breakdown and Negative Bias Temperature Instability

“…steadily improved with scaling of the channel length (Lc), This phenomenon is called gate dielectric breakdown [3,4] gate oxide thickness (Tox), junction depth (xj), operating and has always been an important reliability consideration voltage (VD), etc. [1,2]. It is generally believed, however, for CMOS technologies.…”

A Low-Cost, Micropattern Transfer Process for Thick-Film Metallization of PDMS

“…From the invention of the first solid state transistor in 1947, 1 transistor sizes have shrunk to the scale of tens of nanometers in modern devices. 2 Now, nearly half of the global population has access to a modern cellphone 3 that contains over a thousand times more computing power, at a fraction of the mass, than the computers that once powered NASA's space shuttle. 4,5 These rapid changes in computing have resulted in part from improvements to the size, cost, and performance of commercial electronics.…”