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ECE Professor Krishna and Colleagues in Nature

December 1, 2014

krishna The journal Nature has published research by ECE Professor Sanjay Krishna and his colleagues in its November 11 issue.

The team's paper, titled "Ultrathin compound semiconductor on insulator layers for high-performance nanoscale transistors," describes a way to integrate compound semiconductors on silicon and silicon-dioxide substrates for use in high-performance nanoscale transistors.

In a separate review in Nature's Nov. 11 issue, John A. Rogers of the Department of Materials Science & Engineering at the University of Illinois - Urbana, comments on the work:

"Sometime in the latter part of this decade, fundamental limitations on the switching speed and energy efficiency of silicon transistors may force a shift to a certain level of diversity in semiconductor materials. One future approach might involve integrating non-silicon semiconductors onto silicon platforms to yield heterogeneous systems that exploit different types of materials for different functions. On page 286 of this issue, Ko et al. report an intriguing route to this goal ... based on organized arrays of ribbons of indium arsenide (InAs) delivered to silicon wafers in a type of printing process. Transistors built with such ribbons at nanoscale thicknesses exhibit impressive characteristics, suggesting their potential for enhancing the performance of next-generation silicon electronics."

Rogers adds: "These printing methods are presently in use for the pre-commercial manufacture of photovoltaic modules ... Although the same methods have been suggested for integrating compound semiconductors with silicon, Ko and colleagues achieve by far the most impressive results in this context, accomplished by using semiconductor-material layers at exceptionally small thicknesses, down to just a few nanometres."

If you have a UNM NetID, you can access the Nature article through the UNM Library. Go to the Nov. 11 issue and scroll down to the "Letters" section. Nature provides an abstract of the paper here, and those who subscribe to Nature can read the entire paper from that link.

Krishna's co-authors include researchers at UC Berkeley's Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences Department and its Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center who are also affiliates of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Materials Sciences Division: Hyunhyub Ko, Kuniharu Takei, Rehan Kapadia, Steven Chuang, Hui Fang, Paul W. Leu, Morten Madsen, Alexandra C. Ford, and Ali Javey. Also on the team: UC Berkeley's EECS researchers Kartik Ganapathi and Sayeef Salahuddin; Szu-Ying Chen and Yu-Lun Chueh of the Materials Science & Engineering group at Taiwan's National Tsing Hua University; and Krishna's collaborators at CHTM: ECE Research Assistant Professor Elena Plis and CHTM graduate student and research assistant Ha Sul Kim.

Krishna, who serves as associate director of UNM's Center for High Technology Materials, was promoted to full professor effective July 1, and in April he was named UNM Outstanding Teacher of the Year. He was also named a UNM Regents Lecturer by the School of Engineering in October 2009. Krishna's "INfrared Detector Laboratory" website ishere

A notice about the team's Nature paper also appears in UNM Today

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