Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have recently fabricated a transverse tunneling field-effect transistor. This is a semiconductor device that can be used to amplify or switch electrical power or signals, operating through a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling. The new transistor, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, was built using a van der Waals heterostructure, a material with atomically thin layers that do not mix with each other, but are instead attached via van der Waals interactions.
Tunnel field-effect transistors are an experimental type of semiconductor device that operate via a mechanism known as band-to-band tunneling (BTBT). These transistors have a wide range of applications, for instance, in the development of radiofrequency (RF) oscillators or memory components for electronic devices.
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