Semiconductor crystals could be key to extending Moore’s Law

The Zurich-based team believes that its work, published in Applied Physics Letters, will allow integrated circuits to continue reducing in size and cost, while simultaneously increasing performance.

This will enable an extension of Moore’s Law, an observation made by Intel co-founder Graham Moore in 1965 that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits doubled every year. Although Moore speculated that the trend would continue indefinitely, there has been concern that existing technologies are reaching the limits of their capabilities.

“The whole semiconductor industry wants to keep Moore’s Law going,” said Heinz Schmid, a researcher with IBM Research GmbH at Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland and the lead author of the paper. “We need better performing transistors as we continue down-scaling, and transistors based on silicon won’t give us improvements anymore.”

To combat the limitations imposed by silicon, the team fabricated single crystal nanostructures made with III-V materials, including alloys of indium, gallium and arsenide. III-V semiconductors are believed to be a potential future material for computer chips, but their integration onto silicon has been unsuccessful up until now.