New process give flexibility to strained silicon

Stretching the atomic structure of silicon in the critical components of a device can increase a processor’s performance.

Creating so-called stretched semiconductors with larger spaces between silicon atoms, commonly referred to as strained silicon, allows electrons to move more easily through the material.

The semiconductor industry has used strained silicon to gain better efficiency and performance from the conventional microprocessors that power everyday desktop and laptop computers.

So far, however, manufacturers’ inability to introduce strained silicon into flexible electronics has limited their theoretical speed and power to approximately 15GHz.

Thanks to a new production process being pioneered by University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers, that cap could be lifted.

‘This new design is still pretty conservative,’ said Zhenqiang Ma, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. ‘If we were more aggressive, it could get up to 30 or 40GHz, easily.’

Ma and his collaborators reported their new process today in Nature Scientific Reports.

To create stretched silicon a layer of the material is pulled over a layer of atomically larger silicon germanium alloy, forcing the spaces between atoms to widen.