Move over silicon

Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology plan to present research on transistor technology next week that they hope will jumpstart a new development phase in tiny electronics.


MIT engineers estimate that silicon transistors, essential to gadgets like iPods, phones and kitchen appliances, will hit a wall in terms of size and performance within the next 10 to 15 years. So MIT, among others, is working with new composite materials it hopes will be able to reliably outpace the conducting speed of silicon.

One such material is indium gallium arsenide, or InGaAs, a material in which electrons travel many times faster than in silicon. MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) recently demonstrated InGaAs-fabricated transistors that can carry 2.5 times more current than the latest silicon devices. The transistor was only 60 nanometers, or billionths of a meter long.

The transistor technology is young, and researchers must work through some challenges. For example, InGaAs can break more often than silicon so manufacturing the transistors in bulk could be difficult. Still, del Alamo expects that a prototype of these InGaAs microdevices will be developed in the next two years.