Researchers develop transistor with high on/off switching ratio

A new transistor made from graphene — the world’s thinnest material — has been developed by a research team at the university.

The new transistor is claimed to achieve a record high switching performance, which will make future electronic devices — such as personal digital assistants and computers — more functional and high performance.

In a paper published in Electronics Letters, Dr Zakaria Moktadir of the Nano research group at the university’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), described how his research into graphene led to the development of graphene field-effect transistors (GFETs) with a channel structure at the nano scale.

According to Moktadir, in the context of electronics, graphene could potentially replace — or at least be used side by side with — silicon integrations.

‘CMOS [silicon complementary metal-oxide semiconductor] downscaling is reaching its limits and we need to find a suitable alternative,’ he said. ‘Other researchers had looked at graphene as a possibility, but found that one of the drawbacks was that graphene’s intrinsic physical properties make it difficult to turn off the current flow.’