Germany and Switzerland Join Forces to Create Novel Atomic Scale Integrated Circuit Devices

With the support of the German Siemens Foundation, Germany's Karlsruhe University of Technology (KIT) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ) will jointly carry out R&D of atomic-scale new integrated circuit devices. The German Siemens Foundation has provided 12 million for this purpose. Euro funding.

With the rapid growth of information network transmission and data processing transmission volume, the requirements for miniaturization and energy consumption reduction of devices have become increasingly urgent. Although existing semiconductor integrated circuits have reached a high level, they have gradually approached the limits of their performance. The research and development work must be carried out at a smaller scale.

In 2004, Karlsruhe University of Technology put forward the concept of "single atom transistor". The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the Karlsruhe University of Technology in Germany will jointly conduct in-depth research on this basis. The first step will be to verify the existing On the basis of the sexual design, the logic design and the memory cell structure are improved. In the second step, an atomic-scale semiconductor chip with a simple structure will be developed, and products with practical application values ​​such as integrated circuits, modulators, and detectors will be introduced as soon as possible. . Compared to current metal oxide semiconductor devices, it is expected that the volume and power consumption of the new devices will be reduced to one-thousandth to one-thousandth of the current level. At the same time, it will strive for new technologies that are compatible with current metal oxide semiconductor technologies, and will be quickly transformed into practical applications.

To this end, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and Karlsruhe University of Technology in Germany set up a special research center for monoatomic electronics and optics, and will be officially launched in January 2018.