III-V MOSFETs for Ultimate CMOS

半导体行业是地球上最大的行业之一，每年的营业额超过2000亿美元。半导体工业生产的集成电路存在于所有现代电子设备和产品中，包括移动的电话、汽车、医疗诊断设备、控制工厂和公共交通系统的安全运行以及为互联网供电。简而言之，它们对21世纪的现代生活至关重要。自1957年晶体管发明以来，AMD、英特尔、IBM和飞思卡尔等制造商已经成功地开发出越来越复杂的集成电路，它们将单个晶体管做得更小，并找到了将更多晶体管联合收割机组合在一个芯片上的方法。其结果是集成电路的计算和处理能力的定期增加，每个电路中的晶体管数量每2-3年增加一倍。目前最先进的集成电路包含数亿个晶体管，每个晶体管的直径是人类头发直径的1/10，000。到目前为止，这种能力的提高是由于制造更小的硅基晶体管，但是现在已经达到了硅的性质所施加的基本限制，因此需要考虑替代材料。在上述所有主要制造商看来，化合物半导体是能够持续提高行业性能的有力候选者。格拉斯哥大学的纳米电子研究中心是化合物半导体晶体管技术的世界领导者之一。在过去的3年里，我们一直与飞思卡尔半导体公司密切合作，开发这种晶体管技术，到2016年左右，该技术将准备好进行大规模生产，以满足当时持续改进集成电路性能的需要。该项目为期3年，耗资380万美元，专注于提供原型化合物半导体晶体管技术，该技术能够扩大到大批量生产，并具有所需的性能，以提供2016年集成电路所需的处理和控制功能。除了使用微处理器等数字逻辑的应用外，这项技术预计将在医疗、安全、成像和通信应用的传感器和光子学等领域得到更广泛的应用。来自格拉斯哥大学的五个研究小组将参与这项研究，研究范围包括控制化合物半导体生长技术至原子级精度;半导体材料的电学、化学和结构特性，以及制造晶体管的原子尺度;强大的计算机模拟以优化晶体管设计;开发与现有的、充分理解的硅基方法兼容的化合物半导体处理技术;以及构建原型晶体管以表明性能要求得到满足。该项目将提供关键信息和理解，使半导体行业在未来几十年继续成为地球上最成功的行业之一。

The semiconductor industry is one of the largest on the planet, with a turnover of more than $200 billion each year. Integrated circuits produced by the semiconductor industry are found inside all modern electronic appliances and products including mobile phones, cars, medical diagnostic equipment, controlling the safe operation of factories and public transportation systems and powering the Internet . In short, they are vital to modern life in the 21st Century. Since the invention of the transistor in 1957, manufacturers such as AMD, Intel, IBM and Freescale have been successful in developing ever more complex integrated circuits by making the individual transistors smaller and finding ways to combine more of them together on a single chip. The result has been a regular increase in the computational and processing capability of integrated circuits by doubling the number of transistors in each circuit every 2-3 years. Currently the most advanced integrated circuits contain hundreds of millions of transistors, each of which is 1/10,000 of the diameter of a human hair in size. Until now, this increase in capability has resulted from making smaller silicon-based transistors, however fundamental limits imposed by the properties of silicon are now being reached so that alternative materials need to be considered. In the view of all the major manufacturers mentioned above, a strong candidate to enable continued performance improvements for the industry are compound semiconductors. The Nanoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Glasgow is one of the world leaders in compound semiconductor transistor technology. For the last 3 years we have been working closely with Freescale Semiconductors to develop such transistor technologies which will, by around 2016, be ready for large scale manufacture as required for continued integrated circuit performance improvement at that time. This 3.8M, 3 year project, is focussed on delivering prototype compound semiconductor transistor technology, capable of being scaled up to large volume manufacture, with the required performance to deliver the types of processing and control functions required by integrated circuits in 2016. In addition to applications using digital logic such as microprocessors, this technology is expected to be of more general use, in areas such as sensors and photonics for medial, safety, imaging and communications applications. Five teams from the University of Glasgow will participate in the research which will cover compound semiconductor growth techniques controlled to atomic level precision; electrical, chemical and structural characterisation of the semiconductor materials the transistors fabricated from them, again on atomic lengthscales; powerful computer simulation to optimise transistor design; developing compound semiconductor processing techniques compatible with existing, well understood silicon-based methods; and building prototype transistors to show that the performance requirements are being met. Together, this project will deliver key information and understanding which will enable the semiconductor industry to continue to be one of the most successful on the planet in the coming decades.