Nanowire transistors have overtaken amorphous silicon devices in research at Purdue University in Indiana.
“The issue that is intriguing is we can get relatively high carrier mobility,” Professor Tobin Marks told EW. “That translates into higher drive current or higher operating speed.”
According to Marks, most current thin film materials have relatively low mobility, for example: one to 10cm sq./Vs for amorphous silicon and under 1cm sq./Vs for organic materials.
In contrast, in the Purdue ZnO and InO nanowire transistors “looks like we are getting in the order of a few hundred, at least an order of magnitude of current or speed”, said Marks.
Current capability scales with the number of nanowires in the structure. “We can put in up to 20,” said Marks.
The devices have been demonstrated on both glass and plastic substrates and Purdue is proposing them, amongst other applications, as thin-film transistors for OLED displays.
