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通过使单个晶体管变得更小，并找到将更多晶体管组合在一块芯片上的方法，成功地开发了越来越复杂的集成电路。其结果是，通过每2-3年将每个电路中的晶体管数量翻一番，集成电路的计算和处理能力得到了定期的提高。目前最先进的集成电路包含数以亿计的晶体管，每个晶体管的大小是人头发直径的十分之一。到目前为止，这种能力的提高是通过制造更小的硅基晶体管来实现的，但现在已经达到了硅特性施加的基本限制，因此需要考虑替代材料。在上述所有主要制造商看来，化合物半导体是推动该行业业绩持续改善的有力候选者。格拉斯哥大学纳米电子研究中心是化合物半导体晶体管技术的世界领先者之一。在过去的三年里，我们一直与飞思卡尔半导体密切合作，开发这种晶体管技术，到2016年左右，将准备好大规模生产，以满足届时集成电路性能持续提高的需要。这个为期3年的380万个项目专注于提供原型化合物半导体晶体管技术，能够扩大到大规模生产，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类型。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具有更广泛的用途。来自格拉斯哥大学的五个团队将参与这项研究，内容包括：控制到原子级精度的化合物半导体生长技术；半导体材料的电气、化学和结构特征；由它们制造的晶体管，同样是在原子长度尺度上；强大的计算机模拟，以优化晶体管设计；开发与现有的、众所周知的基于硅的方法兼容的化合物半导体加工技术；以及制造原型晶体管，以表明性能要求得到满足。总而言之，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.