Tag Archives: Xinwei Wang

Christmas-tree shaped ‘4-D’ nanowires

This Dec. 5, 2012 news item on Nanowerk features a seasonal approach to a study about ‘4-D’ nanowires,

A new type of transistor shaped like a Christmas tree has arrived just in time for the holidays, but the prototype won’t be nestled under the tree along with the other gifts.

“It’s a preview of things to come in the semiconductor industry,” said Peide “Peter” Ye, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University.

Researchers from Purdue and Harvard universities created the transistor, which is made from a material that could replace silicon within a decade. Each transistor contains three tiny nanowires made not of silicon, like conventional transistors, but from a material called indium-gallium-arsenide. The three nanowires are progressively smaller, yielding a tapered cross section resembling a Christmas tree.

Sadly, Purdue University (Indiana, US) will not be releasing any images to accompany their Dec. 4, 2012 news release (which originated the news item) about the ‘4-D’ transistor  until Saturday, Dec. 8, 2012.  So here’s an image of a real Christmas tree from the National Christmas Tree Organization’s Common Tree Characteristics webpage,

Douglas Fir Christmas tree from http://www.realchristmastrees.org/dnn/AllAboutTrees/TreeCharacteristics.aspx

 

The Purdue University news release written by Emil Venere provides more detail about the work,

“A one-story house can hold so many people, but more floors, more people, and it’s the same thing with transistors,” Ye said. “Stacking them results in more current and much faster operation for high-speed computing. This adds a whole new dimension, so I call them 4-D.”

The work is led by Purdue doctoral student Jiangjiang Gu and Harvard postdoctoral researcher Xinwei Wang.

The newest generation of silicon computer chips, introduced this year, contain transistors having a vertical 3-D structure instead of a conventional flat design. However, because silicon has a limited “electron mobility” – how fast electrons flow – other materials will likely be needed soon to continue advancing transistors with this 3-D approach, Ye said.

Indium-gallium-arsenide is among several promising semiconductors being studied to replace silicon. Such semiconductors are called III-V materials because they combine elements from the third and fifth groups of the periodic table.

Transistors contain critical components called gates, which enable the devices to switch on and off and to direct the flow of electrical current. Smaller gates make faster operation possible. In today’s 3-D silicon transistors, the length of these gates is about 22 nanometers, or billionths of a meter.

The 3-D design is critical because gate lengths of 22 nanometers and smaller do not work well in a flat transistor architecture. Engineers are working to develop transistors that use even smaller gate lengths; 14 nanometers are expected by 2015, and 10 nanometers by 2018.

However, size reductions beyond 10 nanometers and additional performance improvements are likely not possible using silicon, meaning new materials will be needed to continue progress, Ye said.

Creating smaller transistors also will require finding a new type of insulating, or “dielectric” layer that allows the gate to switch off. As gate lengths shrink smaller than 14 nanometers, the dielectric used in conventional transistors fails to perform properly and is said to “leak” electrical charge when the transistor is turned off.

Nanowires in the new transistors are coated with a different type of composite insulator, a 4-nanometer-thick layer of lanthanum aluminate with an ultrathin, half-nanometer layer of aluminum oxide. The new ultrathin dielectric allowed researchers to create transistors made of indium-gallium- arsenide with 20-nanometer gates, which is a milestone, Ye said.

This work will be presented at the 2012 International Electron Devices (IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers]) meeting in San Francisco, California, Dec. 10 – 12, 2012 (as per the information on the registration page) with the two papers written by the team will be published in the proceedings.

I have a full list of the authors, from the news release,

The authors of the research papers are Gu [Jiangjiang Gu]; Wang [Xinwei Wang]; Purdue doctoral student H. Wu; Purdue postdoctoral research associate J. Shao; Purdue doctoral student A. T. Neal; Michael J. Manfra, Purdue’s William F. and Patty J. Miller Associate Professor of Physics; Roy Gordon, Harvard’s Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Chemistry; and Ye [Peide “Peter” Ye].

Learn to love spiders and their silk as they may help you beat global warming

Most of the research I’ve seen on spider silk has focused on its strength not its thermal conductivity. From the March 5, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

Xinwei Wang had a hunch that spider webs were worth a much closer look. So he ordered eight spiders – Nephila clavipes, golden silk orbweavers – and put them to work eating crickets and spinning webs in the cages he set up in an Iowa State University greenhouse.

Wang, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Iowa State, studies thermal conductivity, the ability of materials to conduct heat. He’s been looking for organic materials that can effectively transfer heat. It’s something diamonds, copper and aluminum are very good at; most materials from living things aren’t very good at all. …

What Wang and his research team found was that spider silks – particularly the draglines that anchor webs in place – conduct heat better than most materials, including very good conductors such as silicon, aluminum and pure iron. Spider silk also conducts heat 1,000 times better than woven silkworm silk and 800 times better than other organic tissues.

The March 5, 2012 news release from Iowa State University provides this detail,

The paper [about the discovery,  “New Secrets of Spider Silk: Exceptionally High Thermal Conductivity and its Abnormal Change under Stretching” – has just been published online by the journal Advanced Materials] reports that using laboratory techniques developed by Wang – “this takes time and patience” – spider silk conducts heat at the rate of 416 watts per meter Kelvin. Copper measures 401. And skin tissues measure .6.

“This is very surprising because spider silk is organic material,” Wang said. “For organic material, this is the highest ever. There are only a few materials higher – silver and diamond.”

Even more surprising, he said, is when spider silk is stretched, thermal conductivity also goes up. Wang said stretching spider silk to its 20 percent limit also increases conductivity by 20 percent. Most materials lose thermal conductivity when they’re stretched.

That discovery “opens a door for soft materials to be another option for thermal conductivity tuning,” Wang wrote in the paper.

And that could lead to spider silk helping to create flexible, heat-dissipating parts for electronics, better clothes for hot weather, bandages that don’t trap heat and many other everyday applications.

Here’s a look at one of Wang’s Golden Silk Orbweavers,

Photo courtesy of the Xinwei Wang research group.

Given that global warming is increasingly described as a certainty, (Simon Fraser University [located in Vancouver, Canada] March 4, 2012 news release,

Warming of 2 degrees inevitable over Canada

Even if zero emissions of greenhouse gases were to be achieved, the world’s temperature would continue to rise by about a quarter of a degree over a decade. That’s a best-case scenario, according to a paper co-written by a Simon Fraser University researcher.

New climate change research – Climate response to zeroed emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols — published in Nature’s online journal, urges the public, governments and industries to wake up to a harsh new reality.

“Let’s be honest, it’s totally unrealistic to believe that we can stop all emissions now,” says Kirsten Zickfeld, an assistant professor of geography at SFU. “Even with aggressive greenhouse gas mitigation, it will be a challenge to keep the projected global rise in temperature under 2 degrees Celsius,” emphasizes Zickfeld.

The geographer wrote the paper with Damon Matthews, a University of Concordia associate professor at the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment.

This discovery about spider silk and its possible applications is very welcome.