Technology Breakthroughs at the 2024 IEEE International Electronic Devices Conference. This year’s focus is on shaping tomorrow’s semiconductor technology.
A recurring theme in the December issue of Nature Electronics is the IEEE International Electronic Devices Conference (IEDM). This year is no different, and we’re back at IEDM, now in its 70th edition, to bring you highlights from the 2024 event. As always, we cover a wide range of research from across academia and industry, including both traditional and emerging electronic materials. Let’s start with the emerging materials aspect.
The field of graphene electronics is now 20 years old1. But before graphene and other two-dimensional materials, there were carbon nanotubes. Although the spotlight has shifted, advances in carbon nanotube electronics and the development of high-performance and thin-film transistors continue.
At IEDM 2024, Lian-Mao Peng, Zhiyong Zhang and colleagues report an approach to create field-effect transistors based on aligned carbon nanotubes that can achieve transconductances as high as 3.7 mS μm–1. Specifically, researchers based at Peking University, Zhejiang University, and University of Electronic Science and Technology of China are using a directly grown gate dielectric that can coat nanotube arrays uniformly.
As Duke University’s Aaron Franklin explains in a News & Views article about the research, the main challenges in developing nanotube transistors for high-performance computing are purification, placement, passivation, and Preparing for production. Although Peng, Zhang and colleagues did not examine the manufacturing readiness of their approach or process, as Franklin points out, their work “addresses the challenges of nanotube purity, placement, and passivation. “It’s an impressive demonstration of what’s possible when we address it.”
Also at IEDM 2024, using more conventional materials, Sheng-Shian Li and colleagues from Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University and the University of California, Berkeley, are using complementary metals to develop ultra-microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). We report a monolithic integration technique that allows the creation of acoustic wave transducers. –Oxide semiconductor (CMOS) back-end-of-line (BEOL) capacitors. This research may be useful for advanced ultrasound sensing and imaging applications and is discussed in a News & Views article by Chaerin Oh and Hyunjoo Lee of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
This year’s IEDM theme is Shaping Tomorrow’s Semiconductor Technology, and the steps the industry chooses to continue scaling devices will inevitably be at the center of it. Fin field-effect transistor structures were introduced in the early 2010s, and the industry has recently moved to gate-all-around structures. A possible next step is a monolithic complementary field-effect transistor device architecture with vertically stacked n-type and p-type transistors.
At IEDM 2024, Sandy Liao and colleagues from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) will report on the development of a manufacturing process for such monolithic complementary transistors. As Peking University’s Xiong Xiong and Yanqing Wu describe the research in a News & Views article, “The TSMC team focused on three key areas: threshold voltage adjustment, vertical metallized drain local interconnect, and backside gate contact. “We worked on process issues.” These advances enabled Liao and colleagues to fabricate inverters with a gate pitch of 48 nm.
Elsewhere, we feature reports on the latest gated all-round CMOS technologies from TSMC and Intel. We will focus on research on the integration of liquid crystal-based spatial light modulators with CMOS image sensors and on the fabrication of reliable 4 Mb embedded resistive random access memory on 28 nm node CMOS platforms. Finally, we highlight advances in thermal models for integrated circuit design and advances in biological compound eyes with wide fields of view.
