Researchers Demonstrate Precisely 'Tunable' Nanowire Diameters

Ildar R. Musin, Dmitriy S. Boyuk, and Michael A. Filler

J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B 31, 020603 (2012);
doi:10.1116/1.4792660

A team of Georgia Tech researchers has taken nanowire growth to a whole new level - by demonstrating a user-programmable process for precisely tuning diameter.

Nanowires are rod-like structures with diameters on the order of a few nanometers, and they grow on substrates in much the same way that trees grow in the forest - from the ground up. "In general, nanowire diameter tends to be fixed, which limits their functionality and usefulness. There are many applications where different diameters along the length of a single nanowire would be beneficial," explains Michael A. Filler, assistant professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech.

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Pushing the Envelope: New Findings Will Help Researchers Develop Next-Generation DRAM Memory

B. Kaczer, S. Clima, K. Tomida, B. Govoreanu, M. Popovici, M.-S. Kim, J. Swerts, A. Belmonte, W.-C. Wang, V. V. Afanas'ev, A. S. Verhulst, G. Pourtois, G. Groeseneken, and M. Jurczak

J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B 31, 01A105 (2013);
doi:10.1116/1.4767125

Society's insatiable need for faster, smaller processors to run our everyday electronics is pushing the limits of a key memory component of these devices called Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM). To achieve additional functionality and boost the performance of DRAM the enabling technologies must be scaled down while keeping the cost of memory the same. Recently, significant progress in the scalability of DRAM has been made, and now a team of researchers at Imec in Belgium has developed an approach that can push the technology to its ultimate scaling limits.Read more

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