Cornell Team Builds Working Transistor From Semiconductor With Record Bandgap Above 7 Electron Volts
Cornell University reported on November 3, through the Cornell Chronicle, that its engineers have made a semiconductor with a bandgap exceeding 7 electron volts and turned it into working devices, including a field-effect transistor. The study was published in Nature on October 7.
The material is silicon-doped aluminum gallium oxide. The previous record was about 6 electron volts, a threshold that has been hard to pass because materials with wider bandgaps tend to behave more like insulators than semiconductors. The work was led by Darrell Schlom, the Tisch University Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and his doctoral student Jacob Steele, the study's lead author, grew thin films of the material using molecular beam epitaxy.
On the device side, a team overseen by Huili Grace Xing, the William L. Quackenbush Professor, and Debdeep Jena, the David E. Burr Professor, built a working diode and a field-effect transistor named the AlphaFET.
The work was supported by the Air Force Research Laboratory-Cornell Center for Epitaxial Solutions and the National Science Foundation, and used the Cornell NanoScale Facility and other shared facilities. Wide-bandgap semiconductors can serve power electronics that operate at higher voltages and temperatures.
Source: Cornell University
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：洁净室内的晶圆加工资料图。Wikimedia Commons，CC BY 4.0，作者 ResearchFrontier。 / Photo: wafer processing in a cleanroom. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0, by ResearchFrontier.
