TY - JOUR
T1 - A steep-slope transistor based on abrupt electronic phase transition
AU - Shukla, Nikhil
AU - Thathachary, Arun V.
AU - Agrawal, Ashish
AU - Paik, Hanjong
AU - Aziz, Ahmedullah
AU - Schlom, Darrell G.
AU - Gupta, Sumeet Kumar
AU - Engel-Herbert, Roman
AU - Datta, Suman
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.
PY - 2015/8/7
Y1 - 2015/8/7
N2 - Collective interactions in functional materials can enable novel macroscopic properties like insulator-to-metal transitions. While implementing such materials into field-effect-transistor technology can potentially augment current state-of-the-art devices by providing unique routes to overcome their conventional limits, attempts to harness the insulator-to-metal transition for high-performance transistors have experienced little success. Here, we demonstrate a pathway for harnessing the abrupt resistivity transformation across the insulator-to-metal transition in vanadium dioxide (VO2), to design a hybrid-phase-transition field-effect transistor that exhibits gate controlled steep ('sub-kT/q') and reversible switching at room temperature. The transistor design, wherein VO2 is implemented in series with the field-effect transistor's source rather than into the channel, exploits negative differential resistance induced across the VO2 to create an internal amplifier that facilitates enhanced performance over a conventional field-effect transistor. Our approach enables low-voltage complementary n-type and p-type transistor operation as demonstrated here, and is applicable to other insulator-to-metal transition materials, offering tantalizing possibilities for energy-efficient logic and memory applications.
AB - Collective interactions in functional materials can enable novel macroscopic properties like insulator-to-metal transitions. While implementing such materials into field-effect-transistor technology can potentially augment current state-of-the-art devices by providing unique routes to overcome their conventional limits, attempts to harness the insulator-to-metal transition for high-performance transistors have experienced little success. Here, we demonstrate a pathway for harnessing the abrupt resistivity transformation across the insulator-to-metal transition in vanadium dioxide (VO2), to design a hybrid-phase-transition field-effect transistor that exhibits gate controlled steep ('sub-kT/q') and reversible switching at room temperature. The transistor design, wherein VO2 is implemented in series with the field-effect transistor's source rather than into the channel, exploits negative differential resistance induced across the VO2 to create an internal amplifier that facilitates enhanced performance over a conventional field-effect transistor. Our approach enables low-voltage complementary n-type and p-type transistor operation as demonstrated here, and is applicable to other insulator-to-metal transition materials, offering tantalizing possibilities for energy-efficient logic and memory applications.
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U2 - 10.1038/ncomms8812
DO - 10.1038/ncomms8812
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84938868442
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 6
JO - Nature communications
JF - Nature communications
M1 - 7812
ER -