A research group at Vienna University of Technology has invented a new form of transistor that has the potential to change the manufacturing of fabbing chips.
The group developed a new adaptive transistor design using germanium (Ge) that can modify its configuration dynamically in response to the required workload. By adapting the connections and so avoiding the creation of separate circuits for the various instructions on a chip, this novel adaptive transistor design enables a decrease of up to 85 percent in the number of transistors required compared to current designs. Additionally, this results in decreased power consumption and generated temperatures, resulting in increased performance and frequency scaling. Professor Walter Weber explained the benefits of this novel adaptive transistor architecture as follows:
Arithmetic operations, which previously required 160 transistors, are possible with 24 transistors thanks to this greater adaptability. In this way, the speed, and energy efficiency of the circuits can also be significantly increased.
Transistors are a critical component in semiconductor design, comparable to the gates that regulate the flow of water: Transistors regulate the direction of current flow from a source to a drain. A control electrode and the transistor's gate are required for this. Due to the transistor's simplicity of operation, sophisticated processes require the use of several transistors. This will change with this new design of adaptive transistors, which will allow the circuit to adjust to the location of the transistor drain, rather than adding a circuit for each operation as is currently done.
The researchers achieved this enhancement by adding an additional control electrode that enables them to modify the behavior of the transistors. A conventional (single electrode) transistor conducts current either by removing electrons from freely moving electrons (which have a negative charge) or by removing an electron from a particular atom, thereby changing its charge to a positive one. This additional Germanium bridge in the new transistor design enables seamless transitions between these two transport states.
The fact that we use germanium is a decisive advantage. It has a very special electronic structure: when voltage is applied, the current flow initially increases, as would be expected to occur. However, after a certain threshold, the current flow decreases again. This is called negative differential resistance. With the help of the control electrode, we can modulate at what voltage that threshold is . This results in new degrees of freedom that we can use to give the transistor exactly the properties we need at the moment.
The primary advantage is undoubtedly the rapid scalability and deployment of this technology. Considering that none of the materials utilized are novel to the industry and that no new specifically specialized techniques are required for their fabrication, we might have ultra-small chips with the same potential as present chips or greatly boost their performance.
New Tech could mean 85% fewer transistors with new adaptive transistor technology in GPUs and CPUs
