This is huge! Dopants require introducing impurities with high temperatures and energies. This should, in theory, have some impact on the final cost (though with all the functionality, I think they'll find a way to charge top dollar). However, it does make it more "green tech" in a sense...and reduce the cost of industry OSHA compliance. Again, I am enthusiastically hypothesizing; dreaming future jobs.
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| Technology Review |
Silicon nanowires are one of the great hopes for electronic devices of the future. Unlike features carved using photolithography, nanowires are easy to make on a nanometre scale. Electronic engineers hope to use them for everything from optoelectronics to biochemical sensing.
But there's a problem because at the nanometre scale, the electronic properties of silicon can depend on the precise location of only a few dopants. That's difficult to control and causes wide variation in device performance.
Consequently, nobody has been able to make reliable diodes, transistors or logic gates out of silicon nanowires.
Today, Massimo Mongillo et amis at the Universite Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, in France demonstrate a way out of this conundrum. These guys show how to fabricate diodes and transistors from undoped silicon nanowires and how how such devices can be wired together to make logic gates.
Technology Review: First Logic Gate Made From Undoped Silicon Nanowires
Physics arXiv:
Multifunctional Devices and Logic Gates With Undoped Silicon Nanowires
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