Yesterday, IEEE Spectrum published a feature “Changing the Transistor Channel” that chronicles the laborious migration from the ubiquitous silicon in transistors to new materials, primarily compound semiconductors known as III-Vs.

These efforts to replace the semiconducting silicon in the channels of transistors is being pursued by all the big chip manufacturers and international research labs.. Various nanomaterials from graphene to nanowires made from III-V materials are being experimented with to help achieve that aim.

As momentum builds in this field, researchers at Michigan Technological University (MTU) are looking ahead not only beyond silicon but also to when semiconductors will not even be needed for transistors.

Yoke Khin Yap, a physicist at MTU, and his colleagues, including those at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), have developed a method by which they use an insulator—boron nitride nanotubes—coupled with quantum dots to create a path for electrons to travel between electrodes in a transistor. No semiconductor material is used in the design.

“The idea was to make a transistor using a nanoscale insulator with nanoscale metals on top,” Yap said in a press release. “In principle, you could get a piece of plastic and spread a handful of metal powders on top to make the devices, if you do it right. But we were trying to create it in nanoscale, so we chose a nanoscale insulator, boron nitride nanotubes, or BNNTs for the substrate.” READ MORE