Major Breakthrough: A New Era for Electronics
Diamond Transistor Breaks Records
Congratulations DIAMFAB!
While it’s the theoretically ideal semiconductor, diamond hasn’t yet made its mark in transistors and other components. Researchers have built a diamond field-effect transistor (JFET) with a current conduction of 50 mA. According to the work published in the journal IEEE Electron Device Letters, this is 5 times the previous record for a transistor with full-volume conduction.
The majority of transistors are made of silicon, silicon carbide, or gallium nitride. Diamond theoretically has better properties than all of these materials, but it is difficult to dope to make it conductive, and its artificial growth remains complicated to control. Nevertheless, diamond transistors have been developed for about thirty years and their performance is improving. Ultimately, such components would make excellent components in converters for electric vehicles and aeronautics. In most cases, diamond transistors only conduct current on their surface, not in their volume, which can pose limitations in terms of conductivity control, manufacturing reproducibility, and reliability. Transistors based on volume conduction offer better scalability, instead of remaining on tiny prototypes, but their conductivity remains low and does not exceed ten milliamperes (mA).
Researchers from the Néel Institute (CNRS), the Plasma and Energy Conversion Laboratory ( LAPLACE , CNRS/Toulouse INP/Univ. Toulouse) and the startup DIAMFAB (France) have designed a diamond transistor achieving a record volume current conduction of 50 mA. The component is a field-effect transistor (JFET) using volume conduction, models which are composed of three pins: the gate, the drain and the source. The team succeeded in obtaining homogeneous layers of diamond, here doped with boron, without the appearance of harmful defects. They were thus able to increase the useful volume of the transistor and its gate, which reaches 14.7 mm with 24 parallel fingers. The transistor is then no longer a simple miniature demonstrator, but is a real usable component.
Scientists now plan to improve the design and production of these transistors, particularly to develop their voltage resistance, that is, their ability to block current on command. Their performance will then be tested in environments closer to applications.
Finally, the researchers will focus on another transistor architecture: metal-oxide-gate field-effect transistors (MOSFETs).
https://diamfab.com/
