1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to field effect transistors (FET's) and more particularly to FET's which are capable of operating properly at nanoscale dimensions.
2. Description of the Related Art
The metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET) is the universal switching device in current computer logic and memory technology. The on-chip density and speed of MOSFETs has doubled every few years, resulting in the high performance of present day logic and, following Moore's Law, in memory. However, recent predictions show that, in its present form with Si as the semiconductor and SiO.sub.2 as the gate insulator, the MOSFET cannot be reduced in scale below a channel length of approximately 55 nm. This will result in less rapid performance improvement in logic chips, and eventually in performance saturation within a few years, unless significant design or material changes can be implemented within the relevant time frame.
The invention described below is a high performance nanoscale field effect transistor (nanoscale FET) designed to be fabricated at scales corresponding to a channel length on the order of 1 nm. The FET according to the invention, termed the "nanoscale FET", is also an extremely fast switch. In terms of on-chip device density and device speed, the nanoscale FET offers an improvement of about 100 over current in-process technology, amounting to a factor of 10,000 improvement in speed-density. The invention achieves these improvements over current technology by material and design changes relative to existing MOSFET design practice, as described below.
One application for the nanoscale FET is in future hybrid logic and memory technology "computer on a chip" high performance systems.