How Atomic Scale Devices Are Transforming Electronics

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After more than a decade of research advances, scientists and technologists are learning to measure and manipulate matter to create fundamentally different electronic devices. In a special discussion, three experts recently explored the dynamics making this possible and why these new advances are exciting researchers.

A memristor, the first fundamentally new electronic circuit device in more than 100 years. Although memory resistance is fundamental to all matter, such devices are not practical except when fabricated on the nanoscale.  Courtesy: S. Williams

 Joining the dialogue: 
* Michelle Simmons, Scientia Professor and Director of the Australian Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, University of New South Wales: "Other groups had found that making nanowires thinner than 10nm wide tended to deactivate their dopants, the atoms added to the wire to make it conductive. We embedded our wire in crystalline silicon to isolate the dopant atoms from surfaces and interfaces that caused this deactivation. We predicted this would give us highly conductive wires, and this is what happened.

The key to making these wires was combining scanning tunneling microscopy, a technique to image and manipulate individual atoms, with molecular beam epitaxy, a way of growing perfect crystals. It gave us great precision in all three dimensions, and when combined with a high density of the dopant atoms, allowed us to create these highly conductive nanowires."
* Paul Weiss, Fred Kavli Chair in Nanosystems Sciences at UCLA and Director of the California NanoSystems Institute: "Because we increasingly have tools to create and to examine precise structures, I think we're going to see more and more demonstrations of what happens at the atomic scale.

We're developing our ability to make nanostructures the same way every time, then manipulate these structures so we can look at very small variations. This allows us to understand their behavior much better, and then come up with clever ways to recreate them. We're never going to make a billion transistors by manipulating individual atoms, but maybe we can use our knowledge to develop chemistries that recreate those structures."
* Stan Williams, Hewlett-Packard Senior Fellow and director of the company's Cognitive Systems Laboratory: "From a commercialization standpoint, the most important thing about nanowires and single-dopant transistors is that they demonstrate scaling. Nobody is going to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a new foundry if they're not sure it's going to work. Michelle's work shows that there's a “there” there. It is a very important demonstration."

Among the topics was the recent announcement by Simmons’ lab that it had created 4-atom-wide nanowires, as well as showed a working transistor made from a single atom. Significant achievements, Simmons believes that research in her field has advanced so far that it warrants special attention. “In every field, there is a time to accelerate your commitment," she said. "In quantum computing, that time is now.”

The researchers also focused on the difficulty introducing transformational advances to industry. Discussing Hewlett-Packard’s plan to commercialize a mass-market flash memory device based on memristors -- a new type of electronic device that stores information by manipulating the location of a few atoms -- Williams noted, “Development costs at least 10 times as much as research, and commercialization costs 10 times as much as development. So in the end, research -- which we think is the most important part -- is only 1 percent of the effort."
A scanning tunneling microscope representation of a four-atom-wide wire embedded in crystalline silicon to prevent damage to the dopants that gave the wires their conductivity.
Courtesy: M. Simmons

As director of the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, Kavli Professor Paul Weiss heads an institute focused on advancing and speeding the commercialization of nanotechnology. Weiss said there are ways to improve the dynamics for progress. “At the same time that we're discovering new materials and new phenomena, we should be looking at how to integrate them into broader structures, to build robust systems, and to manufacture everything reliably. We can't ignore any one area. The beautiful part is when they start to come together.”

The complete dialogue can be found at:http://www.kavlifoundation.org/science-spotlights/
how-atomic-scale-devices-are-transforming-electronics
Contacts and sources:
Kavli Foundation