A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which developed a new ferroelectric material in 2021, has used the same substance to fabricate transistors. The new ultra-thin transistors are said to be superior to those used in electronic devices today. Specifically, scientists boast fast switching speeds in the nanosecond range and incredible durability.
“In my lab, we primarily work on fundamental physics,” says Pablo Jarilo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics, who led the team that produced this groundbreaking work (via Interesting Engineering ). “This is one of the first, and perhaps most dramatic, examples of how very fundamental science has led to something that can have a huge impact on applications.”
The most remarkable ability of this new transistor is the speed at which it can change charge states: current transistor technology switches states in hundreds of nanoseconds, but with this new material this could potentially be reduced to a fraction of that time. This is crucial for high-performance computing, especially as AI technologies process ever-increasing amounts of data.
Because the material is so thin, manufacturers can potentially pack it more densely than current semiconductors, not only improving performance per area but also improving energy efficiency — a key factor for the future of AI processing, especially at a time when power limitations are a major bottleneck in the expansion of data centers.
Another key advancement the MIT team found was the increased durability offered by the new ferroelectric material: Current SSDs have a limited lifespan, with top-of-the-line models capable of writing 700 TB per 1 TB of capacity, but these transistors show no signs of degradation even after switching 100 billion times, potentially paving the way for archival flash storage.
For now, the team has only built one transistor to demonstrate its performance, so there are still some challenges to overcome before the technology can be adopted in everyday devices. “There are some issues, but once we get through them, this material could fit into future electronics in a lot of different ways,” says Ray Ashoori, a member of the group that built the transistor. “We’re very excited about it.”
“If we can grow these materials on a wafer scale, we will be able to create even more of them,” added Kenji Yasuda, an assistant professor at Cornell University and co-lead author of the study.
