Physicists have found a way to make diodes, transistors and logic gates from pure silicon nanowires, without the need for dopants.

Silicon nanowires are one of the great hopes for electronic devices of the future. Unlike features carved using photolithography, nanowires are easy to make on a nanometre scale. Electronic engineers hope to use them for everything from optoelectronics to biochemical sensing.

But there’s a problem because at the nanometre scale, the electronic properties of silicon can depend on the precise location of only a few dopants. That’s difficult to control and causes wide variation in device performance.

Consequently, nobody has been able to make reliable diodes, transistors or logic gates out of silicon nanowires.

Today, Massimo Mongillo et amis at the Universite Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, in France demonstrate a way out of this conundrum. These guys show how to fabricate diodes and transistors from undoped silicon nanowires and how how such devices can be wired together to make logic gates.
via technology review

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