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Hi welcome to Coursera's Nanotechnology:

The Basics, this is week two lecture five.
In nanoelectronics, and my name is Daniel
Middleman.
Thanks for joining me.
Today, we're going to be talking about
what happens
when you try to take a transistor, which
is
the fundamental logic element in
electrical circuits, and try
to make it small, really small, like,
nanometer sized.
So for those of you who watched the extra
enrichment lecture
on semiconductor physics and how a
transistor works
this will be a bit of a review,
for those of you who didn't this is really
all you need to know at this point.
A transistor is really just a three
terminal device.
It's really just a valve.
You have three terminals, which are called
the source
and the drain, and then the gate, as shown
here.
Current will typically flow between the
source and the
drain, depending on whether or not there
is a voltage
applied on the gate.
So the idea is, the gate allows you to
control,
whether or not current flows between the
source and the drain.
It's an on/off switch.
So this allows you to build a logic
element.
Right?
When current is flowing, then you have a
voltage across the device.
And you have a one.
When the current is not flowing, the
voltage is not there.
And you have a zero.
So it's a logical one or a zero which is
controlled, can be turned on and off.
By applying a voltage or not to the gate,
and the way that works is illustrated very
simply in these
two cartoons here when there is a voltage
applied to the gate
in this particular example that causes a
channel to appear which allows
electrons to flow through the channel from
the source to the drain.
When there is no voltage applied to the
gate
as shown in this other picture, there is
no channel.
And you have no current flow between the
source and the
drain, no current can flow there because
there's simply no electrons
in between in that sort of red shaded
region there's no electrons and so
therefore no.
One of the key enabling aspects of this is
that when we apply a voltage on the gate.
We're controlling the flow of current
between the source and the
drain but we're not actually putting any
current into the gate.
No current is flowing there simply a
voltage device
so the gate voltage changes whether or not
there's
a channel there but no current necessarily
flows from
the gate into the device, and that is
controlled
by what's known as this insulating layer,
this insulating dielectric
which is the thin, grey band in these
diagrams here.
That insulator prevents current from
flowing into and out of the gate.
And so, that is really important, because
it
means we can turn this switch on and off.
And the application of a voltage to turn
it on, doesn't dissipate
power in the device since there's no
current flowing in the gate.
No power is dissipated in the gate
electrode.
So clearly when
we make the device smaller, we want to
maintain that characteristic.
And that will be one of the challenges.
So what are some of the issues?
Well, clearly there are several issues.
One of the issues is that when you make
the source and drain very
small, the number of dopants intentionally
added
impurities into the semi-conductor in
those regions.
They begin to interact with each other,
and they begin to
fluctuate statistically, in other words,
if the source electrode is really small,
then how many dopened atoms are there in
there?
Well, the smaller you get it, it might be
that that number
can fluctuate from device to device very,
on a big percentage, right?
Also, when we make this device smaller,
necessarily,
that gate oxide layer, that insulating
layer, becomes thin.
And when it becomes really thin, it can
leak.
And current can start to leak into the
gate which means there's heat dissipation.
And heat, as we have talked about before,
is the enemy.
there are a variety of other interesting,
problems that
arise when you try to make a transistor,
small.
So, what are some interesting solutions?
Well, we've talked about how Moore's Law
is going to keep us on the
road for silicon for at least, perhaps,
another decade or so, more or less.
So, the interesting question is, what
comes next?
Is it still going to be silicon?
And people are thinking about alternative
architectures that use materials other
than silicon.
One of the
interesting ideas is using carbon
nanotubes.
So, as we've talked about, carbon is a
very interesting material which can
form tube like structures which can behave
as either semiconductors or metals, so
we can imagine making transistors out of
carbon structures, and this cartoon shows
an example of a suspended carbon nano tube
this is really a cartoon.
Diagram of something that more or less can
be built in quantities of
one at a time but in this case you can see
how the suspended carbon nano tube
is floating above the gate contact which
allows you
to change the conductive properties of
that tube such
that current will either flow from the
source to
the drain, or not, depending on what
voltage you've
placed on the gate, and because the gate
is
not actually touching the carbon nano
tube, it's suspended.
Therefore you have no current flowing into
the gate,
so this thing will behave just like an
ordinary transistor,
except that it's really one molecule
across.
So in principal it can be very small.
The potential benefits of this are
numerous.
One of them is that carbon
nanotubes as conductors are really
one-dimensional conductors.
And as we have seen in the demonstration
that
you may have watched earlier involving
golf balls, one-dimensional conductors
can have a real advantage, because all the
electrons
will flow very smoothly from one end to
the other.
On the other hand, if there's a defect,
that can lead to a real problem.
But if we can imagine making
nanotubes without defects, then we get
what's known as a very high mobility.
In other words, a very high velocity for
the
electrons for a given voltage applied
across the device.
And that really means extremely good
performance
from the point of view of transistor
operation.
And in addition, we've talked about, a
little bit, we've briefly mentioned that
these nanotubes can not only be
semiconductors, but they can be doped
semiconductors.
So you can imagine having
an N-doped region and a P-doped region
next to each other, and
making a junction which can have
functionality all built in to one
molecule.
So that's a really exciting possibility,
is that you can not only have a
wire, but you can have doped
semiconductors,
really, which are only one nanometer
across.
the challenges of course are how to
fabricate these things that we've
already talked about the wiring challenge
to make that challenge even more steep
if you'd like we imagine trying to make a
transistor that relies in
a single electron so there's a very large
field of research these days.
Which involves single electron transistors
or SETs.
And this is a possible nano-solution.
They can take several different
geometries.
You can imagine making junctions between
metal islands, where a single electron
tunnels across the junction.
that's what's shown in the picture on the
left here.
In the middle picture, what you're seeing
is a puddle of electrons which is sort
of a two-dimensional puddle that's defined
by
these metal electrodes floating on top of
it.
And that puddle, one electron can tunnel
onto the puddle.
And then off of it, and so the charge on
that puddle will increase by 1
and then decrease, and that also can give
you some sort of transistor operation and
sort of
in the ultimate picture you can imagine
having a metal electrode
and another metal electrode with a single
molecule bridging between them.
And that molecule could be some organic
molecule like a benzene
or cyclohexane or a variety of different
possibilities have been investigated.
This is really interesting because a
single molecule transistor is
about as small as you can imagine making a
transistor.
And so that's in some sense the ultimate
limit of logic operations.
How small can you really make a
logic element?
There's a lot of interesting physics here,
there's also a lot of interesting
challenges.
So one of the interesting challenges is
that when
you make your active area of your
transistor really small.
It becomes extraordinarily sensitive to
the environment around it.
So any charge near the active region is
going to act as an effective gate.
Which might not be the gate you actually
want.
Right?
So in some sense this is a good news, bad
news thing.
Right?
The good news
is, that single electron transistors can
be the
most, worlds most, sensitive measurers of
local electric field.
So they can be used very, very sensitively
to detect.
local electric fields.
The bad news is, if you want to use these
for
logic elements, then how do you control
what's going on there?
Switching between on and off can happen
uncontrollably
if there are charges around that you're
not controlling.
So packaging them becomes a really,
really, really important question.
How do you do that?
But this has led to discussions over the
last 15
or 20 years of a field known as molecular
electronics.
And I put this with a question mark,
because it's still really an
open question whether or not such a thing
is possible on any functional scale.
We can make individual devices.
And the way devices are made is sort of
illustrated by this cartoon here.
You make a, a, a, a piece of metal like
gold or something that necks down
to a narrow region.
You decorate the surfaces of that with
molecules.
That's what these little ball and stick
things are
supposed to indicate is some sort of
molecule, and then
with a current pulse, you can break this
metal constriction
so that you have a little gap, a little
junction.
And if you're lucky, one molecule might
bridge across that junction.
Now you have a single electron transistor.
But you'll notice the phrase, if you're
lucky.
That suggests that yes it can be done, but
the
yield might not be very high.
Right, if you make 100 devices you might
get a few that work that's its
hard to imagine how that would be scalable
to manufacturing, but in the meantime its
fascinating.
A test system for studying transport of
electrical
current through a single molecule, and
frankly speaking,
if a single electron transistor is ever
going
to happen as a manufacturing device, we
first
need to understand those transport
questions at
a very fundamental level so at this point.
This is really a research project.
But it's an important one for laying the
foundation for
any type of transistor structure whether
it be in silicon or
carbon nanotubes or anything else which is
small, which is
really, really small, smaller than
anything we've imagined making so far.
So, of course, this all leaves open
questions
that we've discussed already, for example,
the wiring problem.
Right?
The activery of the transistor might be
small, but the leads that are attached
to it tend so far, at least so far, tend
not to be small.
They tend to be big, so the question is
are you
really taking advantage of the nano scale
size of this this
object, if the, things that are attaching
to it are not
really nano scale or extend out to leads
that are macroscopic.
So, Leads to questions of
scalability in manufacturing of the yield
of making devices the stability of
devices.
How stable are they if you have only one
molecule and,
and you leave it out on the table for a
day.
Does it behave the same as it did when you
started or
has the molecule moved, right, so there
are many different open questions here.
There are actually really fundamental
physics questions that are
still unknown for example the energy of
binding of
a single molecule to a surface.
Is only really quantitatively understood
for a few specific examples.
In the general case, it's not well
understood.
Charge transfer depends on everything,
including
the orientation of the molecule, and we
don't know really how to control that, or
really even measure it very well.
we don't understand how charge screening
works,
so if one charge jumps onto the molecule,
How does that affect the probability for a
second one to jump onto the molecule?
We don't
understand things like dissipation where
does the energy go if the, if
the electron jumping onto a molecule leads
to vibrations in the molecule.
How do those vibrations dissipate, where
does that energy go?
Certainly, fascinating questions of the
fundamental physics
of how current flows on the nanoscale,
which we will need to understand
eventually,
no matter what the architecture ultimately
turns out.
So the ideas for this lecture
are several.
First of all, the key challenge when
you're trying to shrink a
circuit down is the transistor right
the transistor is the fundamental logic
element
in, in electronic circuits, so if we
want to make circuits small we
have to make transistors small we need to
know how to do that.
There are of course Moore's law will
sustain us and keep
us in silicone pretty happily for at least
another few generations.
but beyond that we
don't really know what the answer is and
so there are a
number of solutions that are being
investigated, I've only mentioned two of
them
here today, and that is nano wires for
example based on carbon or single
molecule electronics which is a really
fascinating but long term prospect.
Fabrication of these devices,
repeatability of these devices, long term
stability of these devices in, in some
sort of realistic environment.
These are all
open questions which we don't yet know
how, how to answer in many cases.
And of course we have the wiring problem.
How do we make not just one device,
but thousands or millions or billions all
integrated on
a single chip to really exploit the
nanometer
scale size of the active area of these
devices.
So I hope you've enjoyed these this
lecture on transistors and how to
shrink them please tune in next time for
the next lecture on nano electronics.
Thanks.