Technology breakthroughs at the 2024 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting, which this year focuses on shaping the semiconductor technology of tomorrow.
A recurring theme in the December issues of Natural electronics is the IEEE International Meeting on Electronic Devices (IEDM). This year is no different, as we return once again to the MEI, which is now in its 70th edition, and offer you our highlights of the 2024 event. As usual, we cover a range of work from academia and industry, and involving conventional and emerging electronic materials. We start with the emerging materials side.
The field of graphene electronics is now 20 years old1. But before graphene and other two-dimensional materials, there were carbon nanotubes. Although the focus has shifted, progress continues to be made in carbon nanotube electronics and the development of high-performance, thin-film transistors.
At IEDM 2024, Lian-Mao Peng, Zhiyong Zhang and colleagues present an approach to create field-effect transistors based on aligned carbon nanotubes that can have transconductance as high as 3.7 mS μm.–1. The researchers, based at Peking University, Zhejiang University and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, specifically use a directly grown gate dielectric that can conformally coat nanotube arrays.
As Aaron Franklin of Duke University explains in a Article News and opinions About this work, the main challenges in developing nanotube transistors for high-performance computing are purification, placement, passivation, and production readiness. Peng, Zhang, and their colleagues do not examine the production readiness of their approach and process, but as Franklin notes, the work is “an impressive demonstration of what is possible when the challenges of purity , placement and passivation of the nanotubes are noted.”
Also at IEDM 2024, but working with more conventional materials, Sheng-Shian Li and colleagues at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrate a monolithic integration technique capable of creating microelectromechanical system (MEMS) ultrasonic transducers using complementary metals. –Oxide semiconductor (CMOS) end-of-line (BEOL) capacitors. This work, which could be useful in advanced ultrasonic sensing and imaging applications, is discussed in a Article News and opinions by Chaerin Oh and Hyunjoo Lee of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology.
The theme of this year’s IEDM is shaping the semiconductor technology of tomorrow, and the steps the industry chooses to take to continue device scaling will inevitably be central to this goal. In the early 2010s, finned field-effect transistor structures were introduced, and recently the industry has moved to full-gate structures. A potential next step is a monolithic complementary field-effect transistor device architecture in which N-type and P-type transistors are stacked vertically.
At IEDM 2024, Sandy Liao and colleagues from the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) report on developments in the manufacturing processes for these monolithic complementary transistors. As Xiong Xiong and Yanqing Wu of Peking University explain in a Article News and opinions About the work, “the TSMC team addressed three critical process challenges: threshold voltage tuning, local vertical metallized drain interconnects, and back gate contacts.” These advances allow Liao and his colleagues to make inverters with a gate pitch of 48 nm.
Elsewhere we emphasize reports on the latest comprehensive CMOS technologies from TSMC and Intel. We emphasize work on the integration of spatial light modulators based on liquid crystals with CMOS image sensors, and work on manufacturing reliable 4MB integrated resistive RAM on 28nm node CMOS platform. Finally, we emphasize advances in thermal models for integrated circuit design and advances in bionic compound eyes with wide fields of vision.