Beyond CMOS Electronics: Self-Assembled Nanostructures

Abstract

When the first transistors were built in the late 1940s, few could prediet their wide-spread adoption and the capabilities of the integrated circuits (ICs) that would evolve from those initial discoveries. Although the concept of a field-effect transistor controlled by an external gate electrode had been conceived [1] two decades before the first observation of transistor action, the first practical transistors were bipolar transistors, rather than field-effect transistors; adequate control of the interface between the semiconductor and the gate insulator needed for a practical field-effect transistor was lacking. Extensive efforts throughout the 1960s finally provided the interface control needed for practical use of the presently dominant, insulated-gate, field-effect transistors built using the metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) system based on silicon and thermally grown silicon dioxide.