Novel device concepts for energy-efficient electronics

Computing technology has proved to be a pervasive driving force in the world economy over the past two decades. It affects nearly every aspect of life: education, entertainment, transportation, and personal communication all the way down to the basic infrastructure of our economy, i.e. health, engineering, and science. Power dissipation is becoming the greatest challenge for today's electronics. First for the limited capability of the cooling systems to extract the heat from the silicon surface. In modern microprocessors this implies a limitation in the maximum clock frequency and thus in the performances attainable from a single processing unit. Furthermore, the proliferation of portable electronic devices multiplies the use of batteries and their consequent disposal in the environment, an ever growing trend. Nowadays electronic devices contribute to about 10% of the global power consumption, a fair fraction that poses a serious problem of limiting power consumption. The increase in the static power consumption is due to the non-scalability of the transition between the ON and OFF conditions. Reducing power dissipation without reducing, or even improving, the performances requires the development of strongly innovative technologies which, however, must be integrated with the existing ones. This target can be achieved using new materials and new device concepts. This goal can been pursued by filtering out high-energy electrons injected into the channel. There are two different ways to realize this filtering function: (i) the Tunnel-FET (T-FET and, (ii) the superlattice FET (SL-FET). This beyond-CMOS device concept will be further advanced by the use of nanowire structures and the introduction of non-Si materials (SiGe, Ge and III-Vs) integrated on a silicon platform.