\n\tResearchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), report that they have developed the highest-performing III-V metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) field-effect transistors. The UCSB team’s III-V MOSFETs, for the first time in the industry, exhibit on-current, off-current, and operating voltage comparable to or exceeding production silicon devices \u2014 while being constructed at small dimensions relevant to the VLSI (very-large-scale integration) industry.<\/p>\n
\n\tFor the past decade, III-V MOSFETs have been widely studied by a large number of research groups, but no research group had reported a III-V MOSFET with a performance equal to, let alone surpassing, that of a silicon MOSFET of similar size. In particular, UCSB’s transistors possess 25nm gate lengths, an on-current of 0.5mA, and off-current of 100nA per micron of transistor width, and require only 0.5 volt to operate.<\/p>\n
\n\t“The goal in developing new transistors is to reach or beat performance goals while making the transistor smaller\u2014it is no good getting high performance in a big transistor,” said Mark Rodwell, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UCSB. “In time, the UCSB III-V MOSFET should perform significantly better than silicon FinFETs of equal size.”<\/p>\n
\n\tThe UCSB research promises to help deliver higher semiconductor performance at lower power consumption levels for next-generation, high-performance servers. The research is supported by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), the world’s leading university-research consortium for semiconductors and related technologies.<\/p>\n