We’ve seen before that organic approaches to transistors have focused on p-type transistors. While n-type materials have become more available, organic CMOS still isn’t widespread.

In an ISSCC paper, imec made reference to an inorganic thin-film transistor (TFT) that makes use of metal oxide (I’m tempted to call these MOxFETs). We’ll have more on that story in another posting; before getting into that, however, I wanted to learn more about exactly what these MOxFETs are.

It turns out that metal-oxide TFTs have been worked on for some … Read More → "Inorganic n-Type Thin-Film Transistors"

It’s the perennial question (or one of them): how long can silicon last?

Without giving dates, imec’s Rudy Lauwereins opined that silicon will be replaced by GaAs and by germanium.

This is like back to the future in two different ways. Germanium was the semiconductor of choice before silicon was taken up – back when few were actually making a choice. Meanwhile, GaAs was supposed to take over many years ago, and silicon refused to yield its premier position.

One of the things that gives silicon an edge is … Read More → "What Comes After Silicon?"

Three of this year’s ISSCC’s sensor papers related to temperature sensors, although with different approaches and goals.

The first of them addresses the needs of tough environments such as those that automotive and military applications require. Their main motivator was the fact that, at high temperatures, traditional on-chip bipolar junction transistor (BJT) temperature sensors become much less accurate, so designers end up opting for off-chip thermistors and such.

So their idea was not to measure temperature through transistor characteristics, but rather to measure the thermal diffusivity – how fast heat travels, … Read More → "Taking the Temperature"