Recent research led by Penn State has revealed that substrates, often overlooked in semiconductor design, actively participate in electronic processes, similarly to semiconductors. This discovery, centered around the interactions between vanadium dioxide and titanium dioxide, could revolutionize the design and efficiency of future electronic devices. Credit: SciTechDaily.com
The potential of vanadium dioxide as a metal-to-insulator transistor is well-documented and the material is considered promising for semiconductor technology due to its low energy consumption, Gopalan said. However, the material’s properties are still not fully understood, and until now, it has usually been observed in isolation rather than while functioning in a real device.
“The underlying physics of this material is less understood, and its performance in a device geometry is even lesser understood,” Gopalan said. “If we can make them work, there will be a renaissance in electronics. In particular, neuromorphic computing — where computer systems that take inspiration from the brains of living systems with neurons — could seriously benefit by using such devices.
“We found to our great surprise that this substrate is very much active, jiving and responding in completely surprising ways as the film switches from an insulator to a metal and back, when the electrical pulses arrive,” Gopalan said. “This is like watching the tail wagging the dog, which stumped us for a long while. This surprising and previously overlooked observation completely changes how we need to view this technology.
“By bringing these experts together and pooling our understanding of the problem, we were able to go far beyond our individual scope of expertise and discover something new,” said Roman Engel-Herbert, director of the Paul Drude Institute of Solid State Electronics in Berlin, Germany, and co-author of the study whose group grew these films along with Darrell Schlom’s group at Cornell University.
Source: Tech Daily Report (techdailyreport.net)
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