The steady improvement of the microelectronic technology over the years was historically based on the miniaturization of semiconductor devices. To date, device dimensions are approaching some fundamental limits of materials and manufacturing processes. Therefore, a strong need is felt to investigate new materials, and/or innovative device structures, allowing further technological progress. Important candidates are, from the one hand, bi-dimensional materials, such as graphene or molybdenum sulfide and, on the other hand, multi-gate device architectures primarily ensuring less power consumption and, possibly, improved performance. In this context, we are pursuing three different research lines.
- The first research line is facing some of the previous aspects of medium and long-term technology innovation, and is meant to investigate innovative device concepts, such as tunnel field-effect transistors (TFETs), graphene-based transistors (GBT) and superlattice-based FETs (SL-FETs). The former two device concepts are being studied within two European projects.
- The next line addresses the investigation of physical effects, which are getting more and more important for the prediction of device performance, such as the quantum confinement of charge carriers in nanometric structures, band-to-band and source-to-drain electron tunneling, and quasi-ballistic transport, which makes classical transport models obsolete. In addition, this activity pursues the implementation of such models in home-made simulation tools. Commercial software tools are now widely used for device optimization within industrial environments. Yet, adequate physical models of strategic importance are still missing. Among them, the extension of simulation models to semiconductors different from silicon are still investigation themes in the context of another European project.
- Finally, the extreme physical dimensions of individual devices has opened the way to the application of quantum mechanics to the information theory. The aim of this research line is to demonstrate the feasibility of a solid-state physical system able to pursue reversible, rather than dissipative, computation processes. A project along these lines has been formulated and submitted to the European Commission. Algorithmic studies have demonstrated the potential of a hypothetical quantum computer to outperform classical systems for the solution of np-complete problems, with a polynomial, rather than exponential, computation time against problem complexity.
