NewswireToday - /newswire/ - Honolulu, HI, United States, 10/26/2006 - New research at the University of California - Riverside demonstrates a method for the significant enhancement of the carrier mobility in silicon nanowires. Such enhancement would allow to make smaller and faster transistors and improve heat removal..

'Carrier mobility' is a major factor in determining the speed of electronic devices. Aggressive scaling of the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) transistor technology requires a high drive current, which depends on the charge carrier mobility. As the dimensions of nanoelectronic circuits continue to shrink, it is important that the carrier mobility does not deteriorate and, if possible, improves. The search for nanostructures where the carrier mobility values can be preserved or even improved continues owing to the extremely high technological pay-off if successful. Nanowires represent a convenient system to understand the effects of low dimensionality on the carrier drift mobility. One can also look at nanowires as an ultimately scaled transistor channel. New research at the University of California - Riverside demonstrates a method for the significant enhancement of the carrier mobility in silicon nanowires. Such mobility enhancement would allow to make smaller and faster transistors and improve heat removal.

The recent findings of Professor Alexander A. Balandin and Dr. Vladimir A. Fonoberov from the Department of Electrical Engineering at UC – Riverside indicate a possibility for an absolutely new method of mobility enhancement, which utilizes the phonon engineering approach in acoustically mismatched nanostructures.

A recent paper describing the method, titled "Giant Enhancement of the Carrier Mobility in Silicon Nanowires with Diamond Coating", was published in the October 19, 2006 web edition of Nano Letters.

The method extends the nanoscale phonon engineering concept previously proposed by Professor Balandin for improving the thermal management of the downscaled electronic devices.

Read the full article on the Nanowerk website.

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By Michael Berger, Copyright 2006 Nanowerk LLC

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