How will it work?

The new transistor is built using an ultrathin material made from parallel layers of boron nitride, which the researchers say can switch between positive and negative charges in nanoseconds and withstand the effects of the material. over 100 billion cycles without wear.

This makes it ideal not only for high-speed, energy-efficient electronics, but also for denser memory storage. Because boron nitride is so thin (and the voltage required to change the polarization scales depends on the thickness), transistors are made of this material will have extremely low power consumption.

Boron nitride has ferroelectric properties that allow it to switch between positive and negative charges in billionths of a second. This term is used to describe materials that have a spontaneous electrical polarization (separation of positive and negative charges) that can be reversed by an electric field. In the new material, this polarization occurs due to a unique shifting of the material layers under the influence of an electric current. As the boron nitride layers slide past each other, the positions of the boron and nitrogen atoms change, causing the charges to change.

The researchers compared the process to “pressing the palms of your hands together and then gently moving them over each other.” This changes the electronic properties of the material without wearing it out, unlike flash memory made from traditional materials.

Every time you write to and delete flash memory, you get some degradation. It wears out over time, which means you have to use very complex methods to allocate space on the chip to read and write to.
– said Raymond Ashuri, co-author of the study and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ashuri added: “When I think about my entire career in physics, I believe this work could change the world in 10 to 20 years.”

Despite the promising prospects, the researchers admitted they faced challenges in putting the new ferroelectric into production, saying it was “difficult and not amenable to mass production.” The researchers are now working with other industry representatives to resolve the issues.

“If people could grow these materials on a wafer scale, we could do so much more. There are a few challenges, but if they can be overcome, this material has a lot to offer for potential electronics of the future. It’s very exciting,” said study co-author Kenji Yasuda, associate professor in the Department of Applied and Engineering Physics at Cornell University.