Current efforts to maintain Moore’s Law via scaling are expected to take the industry down into the teens of gate lengths, but there’s a lot of debate what happens next with new architectures and exotic materials/processes. Purdue researchers look at three different device designs to survey the playing field at 10nm: carbon nanotubes, graphene nanoribbons, and III-V and silicon ultra-thin-body devices and nanowires. Among their findings: many of them can get good subthreshold swing down to 8nm; nonplanar devices can get good performance even down to 5nm gate lengths; and with identical bandgaps, CNT FETs and small-diameter silicon and III-V nanowires exhibit roughly the same performance, though profile and interband tunneling are critically important. [Paper #11.2, "Ultimate Device Scaling: Intrinsic Performance Comparisons of Carbon-Based, InGaAs and Si Field-Effect Transistors for 5-nm Gate Length"]
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