In recent years, electronics engineers have been trying to identify materials that could help to shrink the size of transistors without compromising their performance and energy efficiency. Low-dimensional semiconductors, solid-state superconducting materials with fewer than three spatial dimensions, could help to achieve this.
Among low-dimensional semiconducting materials that have been found to be particularly promising for reducing the length of gates inside transistors are one-dimensional (1D) carbon nanotubes. Nonetheless, most proposed strategies to dope these materials and control the polarity inside them are not compatible with existing large-scale electronics production methods.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company recently developed new carbon nanotube metal-oxide- semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) with localized solid-state extension doping. These transistors, presented in Nature Electronics, achieve remarkable performances, yet their polarity can be advantageously controlled using a strategy compatible with existing complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) doping processes.
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