With the development of carbon nanotubes and graphene, scientists were given an entirely new collection of materials to work with: sheets and tubes that could be consistently made with thicknesses roughly those of individual atoms. These materials hold the promise of building electronic devices with dimensions smaller than is currently possible through any other process and with properties that can be tuned by using different starting materials.
So far, most of the attention has gone to re-creating new versions of familiar devices. But a new paper by a group of researchers in Shanghai looks into what can be done if you're not constrained by the sorts of devices we currently make in silicon. The result is a device that can perform basic logic in half the transistors silicon needs, can be switched between different logical operations using light, and can store the output of the operation in the device itself.
Small footprint transistor architecture for photoswitching logic and in situ memory (DOI: 10.1038/s41565-019-0462-6) (DX)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @06:21AM (1 child)
three layers of silicon, alternating in electrical charge, the charge property is determined by the chemical composition of the silicon when 'doped' by different elements.
One terminal connects to each layer.
apply the appropriate charge to the middle layer and you negate the charge difference between the two outer layers, allowing current to flow across the device.
this gets you hard switching, on and off.
for amplification, you pre-bias the transistor with resistors, so it's almost conducting, then when you feed a signal in it should amplify it.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday May 29 2019, @08:18AM
Yes, you've described a BJT- Bipolar Junction Transistor, and they're used in all kinds of circuits, including TTL logic. But most of RAM, CPU, GPU, etc., are MOSFET (metal oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor).