Tag Archives: Semiconductor

Breakthrough for tissue-interfaced bioelectronics

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Let’s call this a cold open,

This October 24, 2024 news item on ScienceDaily describes some of what is in the video

The ideal material for interfacing electronics with living tissue is soft, stretchable, and just as water-loving as the tissue itself–in short, a hydrogel. Semiconductors, the key materials for bioelectronics such as pacemakers, biosensors, and drug delivery devices, on the other hand, are rigid, brittle, and water-hating, impossible to dissolve in the way hydrogels have traditionally been built. Scientists have now solved this challenge that has long stymied researchers, reimagining the process of creating hydrogels to build a powerful semiconductor in hydrogel form. The result is a bluish gel that flutters like a sea jelly in water but retains the immense semiconductive ability needed to transmit information between living tissue and machine.

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An October 24, 2024 University of Chicago news release (also on EurekAlert) by Paul Dailing, which originated the news item, describes the breakthrough, Note: Links have been removed,

A paper published today in Science from the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) has solved this challenge that has long stymied researchers, reimagining the process of creating hydrogels to build a powerful semiconductor in hydrogel form. Led by Asst. Prof. Sihong Wang’s research group, the result is a bluish gel that flutters like a sea jelly in water but retains the immense semiconductive ability needed to transmit information between living tissue and machine.

The material demonstrated tissue-level moduli as soft as 81 kPa, stretchability of 150% strain, and charge-carrier mobility up to 1.4 cm2 V-1 s-1. This means their material—both semiconductor and hydrogel at the same time—ticks all the boxes for an ideal bioelectronic interface.

“When making implantable bioelectronic devices, one challenge you must address is to make a device with tissue-like mechanical properties,” said Yahao Dai, the first author of the new paper. “That way, when it gets directly interfaced with the tissue, they can deform together and also form a very intimate bio-interface.”

Although the paper mainly focused on the challenges facing implanted medical devices such as biochemical sensors and pacemakers, Dai said the material also has many potential non-surgical applications, like better readings off the skin or improved care for wounds.

“It has very soft mechanical properties and a large degree of hydration similar to living tissue,” said UChicago PME Asst. Prof. Sihong Wang. “Hydrogel is also very porous, so it allows the efficient diffusion transport of different kinds of nutrition and chemicals. All these traits combine to make hydrogel probably the most useful material for tissue engineering and drug delivery.”

‘Let’s change our perspective’

The typical way of making a hydrogel is to take a material, dissolve it in water, and add the gelation chemicals to puff the new liquid into a gel form. Some materials simply dissolve in water, others require researchers to tinker and chemically modify the process, but the core mechanism is the same: No water, no hydrogel.

Semiconductors, however, don’t normally dissolve in water. Rather than find new, time-consuming means of trying to force the process, the UChicago PME team re-examined the question.

“We started to think, ‘Okay, let’s change our perspective,’ and we came up with a solvent exchange process,” Dai said.

Instead of dissolving the semiconductors in water, they dissolved them in an organic solvent that is miscible with water. They then prepared a gel from the dissolved semiconductors and hydrogel precursors. Their gel initially was an organogel, not a hydrogel.

“To eventually turn it into a hydrogel, we then immersed the whole material system into the water to let the organic solvent dissolve out and let the water come in,” Dai said.

An important benefit of such a solvent-exchange-based method is its broad applicability to different types of polymer semiconductors with different functions.

‘One plus one is greater than two’

The hydrogel semiconductor, which the team has patented and is commercializing through UChicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, is not merging a semiconductor with a hydrogel. It’s one material that is both semiconductor and hydrogel at the same time.

“It’s just one piece that has both semiconducting properties and hydrogel design, meaning that this whole piece is just like any other hydrogel,” Wang said.

Unlike any other hydrogel, however, the new material actually improved biological functions in two areas, creating better results than either hydrogel or semiconductor could accomplish on their own.

First, having a very soft material bond directly with tissue reduces the immune responses and inflammation typically triggered when a medical device is implanted.

Second, because hydrogels are so porous, the new material enables elevated biosensing response and stronger photo-modulation effects. With biomolecules being able to diffuse into the film to have volumetric interactions, the interaction sites for biomarkers-under-detection are significantly increased, which gives rise to higher sensitivity. Besides sensing, the responses to light for therapeutic functions at tissue surfaces also get increased from the more efficient transport of redox-active species. This benefits functions such as light-operated pacemakers or wound dressing that can be more efficiently heated with a flick of light to help speed healing.

“It’s a ‘one plus one is greater than two’ kind of combination,” Wang joked.

Researchers in the lab of UChicago Pritzker School of Engineering Asst. Prof. Sihong Wang (right), including PhD student Yahao Dai (left), have developed a hydrogel that retains the semiconductive ability needed to transmit information between living tissue and machine, which can be used both in implantable medical devices and non-surgical applications. (Photo by John Zich)

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Soft hydrogel semiconductors with augmented biointeractive functions by Yahao Dai, Shinya Wai, Pengju Li, Naisong Shan, Zhiqiang Cao, Yang Li, Yunfei Wang, Youdi Liu, Wei Liu, Kan Tang, Yuzi Liu, Muchuan Hua, Songsong Li, Nan Li, Shivani Chatterji, H. Christopher Fry, Sean Lee, Cheng Zhang, Max Weires, Sean Sutyak, Jiuyun Shi, Chenhui Zhu, Jie Xu, Xiaodan Gu, Bozhi Tian, and Sihong Wang. Science 24 Oct 2024 Vol 386, Issue 6720 pp. 431-439 DOI: 10.1126/science.adp9314

This paper is behind a paywall.

Memristors with better mimicry of synapses

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It seems to me it’s been quite a while since I’ve stumbled across a memristor story from the University of Micihigan but it was worth waiting for. (Much of the research around memristors has to do with their potential application in neuromorphic (brainlike) computers.) From a December 17, 2018 news item on ScienceDaily,

A new electronic device developed at the University of Michigan can directly model the behaviors of a synapse, which is a connection between two neurons.

For the first time, the way that neurons share or compete for resources can be explored in hardware without the need for complicated circuits.

“Neuroscientists have argued that competition and cooperation behaviors among synapses are very important. Our new memristive devices allow us to implement a faithful model of these behaviors in a solid-state system,” said Wei Lu, U-M professor of electrical and computer engineering and senior author of the study in Nature Materials.

A December 17, 2018 University of Michigan news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides an explanation of memristors and their ‘similarity’ to synapses while providing more details about this latest research,

Memristors are electrical resistors with memory–advanced electronic devices that regulate current based on the history of the voltages applied to them. They can store and process data simultaneously, which makes them a lot more efficient than traditional systems. They could enable new platforms that process a vast number of signals in parallel and are capable of advanced machine learning.

The memristor is a good model for a synapse. It mimics the way that the connections between neurons strengthen or weaken when signals pass through them. But the changes in conductance typically come from changes in the shape of the channels of conductive material within the memristor. These channels–and the memristor’s ability to conduct electricity–could not be precisely controlled in previous devices.

Now, the U-M team has made a memristor in which they have better command of the conducting pathways.They developed a new material out of the semiconductor molybdenum disulfide–a “two-dimensional” material that can be peeled into layers just a few atoms thick. Lu’s team injected lithium ions into the gaps between molybdenum disulfide layers.
They found that if there are enough lithium ions present, the molybdenum sulfide transforms its lattice structure, enabling electrons to run through the film easily as if it were a metal. But in areas with too few lithium ions, the molybdenum sulfide restores its original lattice structure and becomes a semiconductor, and electrical signals have a hard time getting through.

The lithium ions are easy to rearrange within the layer by sliding them with an electric field. This changes the size of the regions that conduct electricity little by little and thereby controls the device’s conductance.

“Because we change the ‘bulk’ properties of the film, the conductance change is much more gradual and much more controllable,” Lu said.

In addition to making the devices behave better, the layered structure enabled Lu’s team to link multiple memristors together through shared lithium ions–creating a kind of connection that is also found in brains. A single neuron’s dendrite, or its signal-receiving end, may have several synapses connecting it to the signaling arms of other neurons. Lu compares the availability of lithium ions to that of a protein that enables synapses to grow.

If the growth of one synapse releases these proteins, called plasticity-related proteins, other synapses nearby can also grow–this is cooperation. Neuroscientists have argued that cooperation between synapses helps to rapidly form vivid memories that last for decades and create associative memories, like a scent that reminds you of your grandmother’s house, for example. If the protein is scarce, one synapse will grow at the expense of the other–and this competition pares down our brains’ connections and keeps them from exploding with signals.
Lu’s team was able to show these phenomena directly using their memristor devices. In the competition scenario, lithium ions were drained away from one side of the device. The side with the lithium ions increased its conductance, emulating the growth, and the conductance of the device with little lithium was stunted.

In a cooperation scenario, they made a memristor network with four devices that can exchange lithium ions, and then siphoned some lithium ions from one device out to the others. In this case, not only could the lithium donor increase its conductance–the other three devices could too, although their signals weren’t as strong.

Lu’s team is currently building networks of memristors like these to explore their potential for neuromorphic computing, which mimics the circuitry of the brain.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Ionic modulation and ionic coupling effects in MoS2 devices for neuromorphic computing by Xiaojian Zhu, Da Li, Xiaogan Liang, & Wei D. Lu. Nature Materials (2018) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-018-0248-5 Published 17 December 2018

This paper is behind a paywall.

The researchers have made images illustrating their work available,

A schematic of the molybdenum disulfide layers with lithium ions between them. On the right, the simplified inset shows how the molybdenum disulfide changes its atom arrangements in the presence and absence of the lithium atoms, between a metal (1T’ phase) and semiconductor (2H phase), respectively. Image credit: Xiaojian Zhu, Nanoelectronics Group, University of Michigan.

A diagram of a synapse receiving a signal from one of the connecting neurons. This signal activates the generation of plasticity-related proteins (PRPs), which help a synapse to grow. They can migrate to other synapses, which enables multiple synapses to grow at once. The new device is the first to mimic this process directly, without the need for software or complicated circuits. Image credit: Xiaojian Zhu, Nanoelectronics Group, University of Michigan.
An electron microscope image showing the rectangular gold (Au) electrodes representing signalling neurons and the rounded electrode representing the receiving neuron. The material of molybdenum disulfide layered with lithium connects the electrodes, enabling the simulation of cooperative growth among synapses. Image credit: Xiaojian Zhu, Nanoelectronics Group, University of Michigan.

That’s all folks.

Making nanoscale transistor chips out of thin air—sort of

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Caption: The nano-gap transistors operating in air. As gaps become smaller than the mean-free path of electrons in air, there is ballistic electron transport. Credit: RMIT University

A November 19, 2018 news item on Nanowerk describes the ‘airy’ work ( Note: A link has been removed),

Researchers at RMIT University [Ausralia] have engineered a new type of transistor, the building block for all electronics. Instead of sending electrical currents through silicon, these transistors send electrons through narrow air gaps, where they can travel unimpeded as if in space.

The device unveiled in material sciences journal Nano Letters (“Metal–Air Transistors: Semiconductor-free field-emission air-channel nanoelectronics”), eliminates the use of any semiconductor at all, making it faster and less prone to heating up.

A November 19, 2018 RMIT University news release on EurkeAlert, which originated the news item, describes the work and possibilities in more detail,

Lead author and PhD candidate in RMIT’s Functional Materials and Microsystems Research Group, Ms Shruti Nirantar, said this promising proof-of-concept design for nanochips as a combination of metal and air gaps could revolutionise electronics.

“Every computer and phone has millions to billions of electronic transistors made from silicon, but this technology is reaching its physical limits where the silicon atoms get in the way of the current flow, limiting speed and causing heat,” Nirantar said.

“Our air channel transistor technology has the current flowing through air, so there are no collisions to slow it down and no resistance in the material to produce heat.”

The power of computer chips – or number of transistors squeezed onto a silicon chip – has increased on a predictable path for decades, roughly doubling every two years. But this rate of progress, known as Moore’s Law, has slowed in recent years as engineers struggle to make transistor parts, which are already smaller than the tiniest viruses, smaller still.

Nirantar says their research is a promising way forward for nano electronics in response to the limitation of silicon-based electronics.

“This technology simply takes a different pathway to the miniaturisation of a transistor in an effort to uphold Moore’s Law for several more decades,” Shruti said.

Research team leader Associate Professor Sharath Sriram said the design solved a major flaw in traditional solid channel transistors – they are packed with atoms – which meant electrons passing through them collided, slowed down and wasted energy as heat.

“Imagine walking on a densely crowded street in an effort to get from point A to B. The crowd slows your progress and drains your energy,” Sriram said.

“Travelling in a vacuum on the other hand is like an empty highway where you can drive faster with higher energy efficiency.”

But while this concept is obvious, vacuum packaging solutions around transistors to make them faster would also make them much bigger, so are not viable.

“We address this by creating a nanoscale gap between two metal points. The gap is only a few tens of nanometers, or 50,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, but it’s enough to fool electrons into thinking that they are travelling through a vacuum and re-create a virtual outer-space for electrons within the nanoscale air gap,” he said.

The nanoscale device is designed to be compatible with modern industry fabrication and development processes. It also has applications in space – both as electronics resistant to radiation and to use electron emission for steering and positioning ‘nano-satellites’.

“This is a step towards an exciting technology which aims to create something out of nothing to significantly increase speed of electronics and maintain pace of rapid technological progress,” Sriram said.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Metal–Air Transistors: Semiconductor-free field-emission air-channel nanoelectronics by
Shruti Nirantar, Taimur Ahmed, Guanghui Ren, Philipp Gutruf, Chenglong Xu, Madhu Bhaskaran, Sumeet Walia, and Sharath Sriram. Nano Lett., DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.8b02849 Publication Date (Web): November 16, 2018

Copyright © 2018 American Chemical Society

This paper is behind a paywall.

Bendable phones that are partially organic

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It’s been about nine  or 10 years since I first heard about bendable phones (my September 29, 2010 posting). The concept keeps popping up from time to time (my April 25, 2017 posting) and this time, we have Australian scientists to thank for this latest work described in an October 5, 2018 news item on Nanowerk (Note: A link has been removed),

Engineers at ANU [Australian National University] have invented a semiconductor with organic and inorganic materials that can convert electricity into light very efficiently, and it is thin and flexible enough to help make devices such as mobile phones bendable (Advanced Materials, “Efficient and Layer-Dependent Exciton Pumping across Atomically Thin Organic–Inorganic Type-I Heterostructures”).

The invention also opens the door to a new generation of high-performance electronic devices made with organic materials that will be biodegradable or that can be easily recycled, promising to help substantially reduce e-waste.

An October 5, 2018 ANU press release (also on EurekAlert but published October 4, 2018) expands on the theme,

The huge volumes of e-waste generated by discarded electronic devices around the world is causing irreversible damage to the environment. Australia produces 200,000 tonnes of e-waste every year – only four per cent of this waste is recycled.

The organic component has the thickness of just one atom – made from just carbon and hydrogen – and forms part of the semiconductor that the ANU team developed. The inorganic component has the thickness of around two atoms. The hybrid structure can convert electricity into light efficiently for displays on mobile phones, televisions and other electronic devices.

Lead senior researcher Associate Professor Larry Lu said the invention was a major breakthrough in the field.

“For the first time, we have developed an ultra-thin electronics component with excellent semiconducting properties that is an organic-inorganic hybrid structure and thin and flexible enough for future technologies, such as bendable mobile phones and display screens,” said Associate Professor Lu from the ANU Research School of Engineering.

PhD researcher Ankur Sharma, who recently won the ANU 3-Minute Thesis competition, said experiments demonstrated the performance of their semiconductor would be much more efficient than conventional semiconductors made with inorganic materials such as silicon.

“We have the potential with this semiconductor to make mobile phones as powerful as today’s supercomputers,” said Mr Sharma from the ANU Research School of Engineering.

“The light emission from our semiconducting structure is very sharp, so it can be used for high-resolution displays and, since the materials are ultra-thin, they have the flexibility to be made into bendable screens and mobile phones in the near future.”

The team grew the organic semiconductor component molecule by molecule, in a similar way to 3D printing. The process is called chemical vapour deposition.

“We characterised the opto-electronic and electrical properties of our invention to confirm the tremendous potential of it to be used as a future semiconductor component,” Associate Professor Lu said.

“We are working on growing our semiconductor component on a large scale, so it can be commercialised in collaboration with prospective industry partners.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Efficient and Layer‐Dependent Exciton Pumping across Atomically Thin Organic–Inorganic Type‐I Heterostructures by Linglong Zhang, Ankur Sharma, Yi Zhu, Yuhan Zhang, Bowen Wang, Miheng Dong, Hieu T. Nguyen, Zhu Wang, Bo Wen, Yujie Cao, Boqing Liu, Xueqian Sun, Jiong Yang, Ziyuan Li. Advanced Materials Volume30, Issue 40 1803986 (October 4, 2018) DOI:https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.201803986 First published [onliine]: 30 August 2018

This paper is behind a paywall.

New semiconductor material from pigment produced by fungi?

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Chlorociboria Aeruginascens fungus on a tree log. (Image: Oregon State University)

Apparently the pigment derived from the fungi you see in the above picture is used by visual artists and, perhaps soon, will be used by electronics manufacturers. From a June 5, 2018 news item on Nanowerk,

Researchers at Oregon State University are looking at a highly durable organic pigment, used by humans in artwork for hundreds of years, as a promising possibility as a semiconductor material.

Findings suggest it could become a sustainable, low-cost, easily fabricated alternative to silicon in electronic or optoelectronic applications where the high-performance capabilities of silicon aren’t required.

Optoelectronics is technology working with the combined use of light and electronics, such as solar cells, and the pigment being studied is xylindein.

A June 5, 2018 Oregon State University news release by Steve Lundeberg, which originated the news item, expands on the theme,

“Xylindein is pretty, but can it also be useful? How much can we squeeze out of it?” said Oregon State University [OSU] physicist Oksana Ostroverkhova. “It functions as an electronic material but not a great one, but there’s optimism we can make it better.”

Xylindien is secreted by two wood-eating fungi in the Chlorociboria genus. Any wood that’s infected by the fungi is stained a blue-green color, and artisans have prized xylindein-affected wood for centuries.

The pigment is so stable that decorative products made half a millennium ago still exhibit its distinctive hue. It holds up against prolonged exposure to heat, ultraviolet light and electrical stress.

“If we can learn the secret for why those fungi-produced pigments are so stable, we could solve a problem that exists with organic electronics,” Ostroverkhova said. “Also, many organic electronic materials are too expensive to produce, so we’re looking to do something inexpensively in an ecologically friendly way that’s good for the economy.”

With current fabrication techniques, xylindein tends to form non-uniform films with a porous, irregular, “rocky” structure.

“There’s a lot of performance variation,” she said. “You can tinker with it in the lab, but you can’t really make a technologically relevant device out of it on a large scale. But we found a way to make it more easily processed and to get a decent film quality.”

Ostroverkhova and collaborators in OSU’s colleges of Science and Forestry blended xylindein with a transparent, non-conductive polymer, poly(methyl methacrylate), abbreviated to PMMA and sometimes known as acrylic glass. They drop-cast solutions both of pristine xylindein and a xlyindein-PMMA blend onto electrodes on a glass substrate for testing.

They found the non-conducting polymer greatly improved the film structure without a detrimental effect on xylindein’s electrical properties. And the blended films actually showed better photosensitivity.

“Exactly why that happened, and its potential value in solar cells, is something we’ll be investigating in future research,” Ostroverkhova said. “We’ll also look into replacing the polymer with a natural product – something sustainable made from cellulose. We could grow the pigment from the cellulose and be able to make a device that’s all ready to go.

“Xylindein will never beat silicon, but for many applications, it doesn’t need to beat silicon,” she said. “It could work well for depositing onto large, flexible substrates, like for making wearable electronics.”

This research, whose findings were recently published in MRS Advances, represents the first use of a fungus-produced material in a thin-film electrical device.

“And there are a lot more of the materials,” Ostroverkhova said. “This is just first one we’ve explored. It could be the beginning of a whole new class of organic electronic materials.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Fungi-Derived Pigments for Sustainable Organic (Opto)Electronics by Gregory Giesbers, Jonathan Van Schenck, Sarath Vega Gutierrez, Sara Robinson. MRS Advances https://doi.org/10.1557/adv.2018.446 Published online: 21 May 2018

This paper is behind a paywall.

Golden nanoglue

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This starts out as a graphene story before taking an abrupt turn. From a June 5, 2018 news item on Nanowerk,

Graphene has undoubtedly been the most popular research subject of nanotechnology during recent years. Made of pure carbon, this material is in principle easy to manufacture: take ordinary graphite and peel one layer off with Scotch tape. The material thus obtained is two-dimensional, yielding unique properties, different from those in three-dimensional materials.

Graphene, however, lacks one important property, semiconductivity, which complicates its usage in electronics applications. Scientists have therefore started the quest of other two-dimensional materials with this desired property.

Molybdenum disulfide, MoS2 is among the most promising candidates. Like graphene, MoS2 consists of layers, interacting weakly with one another. In addition to being a semiconductor, the semiconducting properties of MoS2 change depending on the number of atomic layers.

A June 5, 2018 University of Oulu press release, which originated the news item,  gives more detail about the work,

For the one or few layer MoS2 to be useful in applications, one must be able to join it to other components. What is thus needed is such a metallic conductor that electric current can easily flow between the conductor and the semiconductor. In the case of MoS2, a promising conductor is provided by nickel, which also has other desired properties from the applications point of view.

However, an international collaboration, led by the Nano and molecular systems research unit at the University of Oulu has recently discovered that nanoparticles made of nickel do not attach to MoS2. One needs gold, which ‘glues’ the conductor and the component together. Says docent Wei Cao of NANOMO: “The synthesis is performed through a sonochemical method.” Sonochemistry is a method where chemical reactions are established using ultrasound. NANOMO scientist Xinying Shi adds: “The semiconductor and metal can be bridged either by the crystallized gold nanoparticles, or by the newly formed MoS2-Au-Ni ternary alloy.”

The nanojunction so established has a very small electrical resistivity. It also preserves the semiconducting and magnetic properties of MoS2. In addition, the new material has desirable properties beyond those of the original constituents. For example, it acts as a photocatalyst, which works much more efficiently than pure MoS2. Manufacturing the golden nanojunction is easy and cheap, which makes the new material attractive from the applications point of view.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Metallic Contact between MoS2 and Ni via Au Nanoglue by Xinying Shi, Sergei Posysaev, Marko Huttula, Vladimir Pankratov, Joanna Hoszowska, Jean‐Claude Dousse, Faisal Zeeshan, Yuran Niu, Alexei Zakharov, Taohai Li. Small Volume 14, Issue22 May 29, 2018 1704526 First published online: 24 April 2018 https://doi.org/10.1002/smll.201704526

This paper is behind a paywall.

There is a pretty illustration of the ‘golden nanojunctions’,

Golden nanoglue (Courtesy of the University of Oulu)

Unleashing graphene electronics potential with a trio of 2D nanomaterials

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Graphene has excited a great deal of interest, especially with regard to its application in the field of electronics. However, it seems that graphene may need a little help from its friends, tantalum sulfide and boron nitride, according to a July 6, 2016 news item on ScienceDaily,

Graphene has emerged as one of the most promising two-dimensional crystals, but the future of electronics may include two other nanomaterials, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Riverside and the University of Georgia.

In research published Monday (July 4 [2016]) in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, the researchers described the integration of three very different two-dimensional (2D) materials to yield a simple, compact, and fast voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) device. A VCO is an electronic oscillator whose oscillation frequency is controlled by a voltage input.

Titled “An integrated Tantalum Sulfide–Boron Nitride–Graphene Oscillator: A Charge-Density-Wave Device Operating at Room Temperature,” the paper describes the development of the first useful device that exploits the potential of charge-density waves to modulate an electrical current through a 2D material. The new technology could become an ultralow power alternative to conventional silicon-based devices, which are used in thousands of applications from computers to clocks to radios. The thin, flexible nature of the device would make it ideal for use in wearable technologies.

A July 5, 2016 University of California at Riverside (UCR) news release (also on EurekAlert) by Sarah Nightingale, which originated the news item, expands on the theme,

Graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms that exhibits exceptional electrical and thermal conductivities, shows promise as a successor to silicon-based transistors. However, its application has been limited by its inability to function as a semiconductor, which is critical for the ‘on-off’ switching operations performed by electronic components.

To overcome this shortfall, the researchers turned to another 2D nanomaterial, Tantalum Sulfide (TaS2). They showed that voltage-induced changes in the atomic structure of the ‘1T prototype’ of TaS2 enable it to function as an electrical switch at room temperature–a requirement for practical applications.

“There are many charge-density wave materials that have interesting electrical switching properties. However, most of them reveal these properties at very low temperature only. The particular polytype of TaS2 that we used can have abrupt changes in resistance above room temperature. That made a crucial difference,” said Alexander Balandin, UC presidential chair professor of electrical and computer engineering in UCR’s Bourns College of Engineering, who led the research team.

To protect the TaS2 from environmental damage, the researchers coated it with another 2D material, hexagonal boron nitrate, to prevent oxidation. By pairing the boron nitride-capped TaS2 with graphene, the team constructed a three-layer VCO that could pave the way for post-silicon electronics. In the proposed design, graphene functions as an integrated tunable load resistor, which enables precise voltage control of the current and VCO frequency. The prototype UCR devices operated at MHz frequency used in radios, and the extremely fast physical processes that define the device functionality allow for the operation frequency to increase all the way to THz.

Balandin said the integrated system is the first example of a functional voltage-controlled oscillator device comprising 2D materials that operates at room temperature.

“It is difficult to compete with silicon, which has been used and improved for the past 50 years. However, we believe our device shows a unique integration of three very different 2D materials, which utilizes the intrinsic properties of each of these materials. The device can potentially become a low-power alternative to conventional silicon technologies in many different applications,” Balandin said.

The electronic function of graphene envisioned in the proposed 2D device overcomes the problem associated with the absence of the energy band gap, which so far prevented graphene’s use as the transistor channel material. The extremely high thermal conductivity of graphene comes as an additional benefit in the device structure, by facilitating heat removal. The unique heat conduction properties of graphene were experimentally discovered and theoretically explained in 2008 by Balandin’s group at UCR. The Materials Research Society recognized this groundbreaking achievement by awarding Balandin the MRS Medal in 2013.

The Balandin group also demonstrated the first integrated graphene heat spreaders for high-power transistors and light-emitting diodes. “In those applications, graphene was used exclusively as heat conducting material. Its thermal conductivity was the main property. In the present device, we utilize both electrical and thermal conductivity of graphene,” Balandin added.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

A charge-density-wave oscillator based on an integrated tantalum disulfide–boron nitride–graphene device operating at room temperature by Guanxiong Liu, Bishwajit Debnath, Timothy R. Pope, Tina T. Salguero, Roger K. Lake, & Alexander A. Balandin. Nature Nanotechnology (2016) doi:10.1038/nnano.2016.108 Published online 04 July 2016

This paper is behind a paywall.

Worlds in the making at FACT in Liverpool

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It’s quite the week for finding art/science/technology projects in the UK. This time I’ve found the Worlds in the Making exhibition at FACT (from their About page),

FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) has been leading the UK video, film and new media arts scene for 20 years with groundbreaking exhibitions, education and research projects. The organisation aims to pioneer new forms of artistic and social interaction with individuals and communities.

Frank Swain’s July 1, 2011 article about the exhibition  for The Guardian notes,

Artist duo Semiconductor launch a major exhibition at the Fact [sic] gallery in Liverpool on Friday [July 1, 2011] portraying the subterranean, primeval world of geology.

“We’re really interested in the material nature of the world around us – in what the natural building blocks are of the visible physical world, and how we create an understanding of them,” says Ruth Jarman, one half of British artist duo Semiconductor [Joe Gerhardt is the other half].

One of the works on display features an audio representation of gems being created in the Earth’s subterranean depths. I think they’ve included the sound in their video preview of the show,

As for Swain’s (aka @sciencepunk on Twitter) provocative closing question,

Worlds in the Making is certainly art, but does it do anything for science? Can artists like Jarman and Gerhardt inspire wonder in the same way Brian Cox [BBC science presenter/programme host] does?

I think one of the answers is that there are many ways to inspire wonder and that artists such as Semiconductor and presenters such as Brian Cox can co-exist inspiring wonder each in their unique fashion. Thank you to Frank Swain for asking the question in such a way as to expose a false dichotomy.

FACT was last mentioned here in my October 1, 2009 posting.