The invention of transistor revolutionized the electronics industries, these humble devices are extensively used as switching components in almost all electronic devices. A transistor and a high performing memory technology such as RAM is used in a computer chip for processing and storing the information. But until today, they cannot be combined together or placed nearer to one another because the memory units are made from Ferroelectric material and the transistors are made from silicon, a semiconductor material.
The Engineers of Purdue University have developed a way to make transistors store information. They have achieved this by solving the problem of combining the transistor with the Ferroelectric RAM. This combination was not possible earlier due to problems that occurred during the interface of silicon and Ferroelectric material, hence the RAM always operates as a separate unit which limits the potential to make computing much more efficient.
A team led by Peide Ye, the Richard J. and Mary Jo Schwartz Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue overcome the issue by using a semiconductor with a Ferroelectric property so that both the devices are Ferroelectric in nature and they can be easily used together. The new semiconductor device was called the Ferroelectric Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor.
The New Transistor was made with the material called “Alpha Indium Selenide” that not only has a Ferroelectric property but also addresses one of the great issues of Ferroelectric materials acting as an insulator due to the wide bandgap. But to the difference, Alpha Indium Selenide has a smaller bandgap when compared with other Ferroelectric material which allows it to act as a semiconductor without losing its Ferroelectric properties. These Transistors had shown comparable performance to the existing Ferroelectric field-effect transistors.
