PMID- 18052402 OWN - NLM STAT- MEDLINE DCOM- 20080415 LR - 20200930 IS - 1530-6984 (Print) IS - 1530-6984 (Linking) VI - 8 IP - 2 DP - 2008 Feb TI - Use of negative capacitance to provide voltage amplification for low power nanoscale devices. PG - 405-10 AB - It is well-known that conventional field effect transistors (FETs) require a change in the channel potential of at least 60 mV at 300 K to effect a change in the current by a factor of 10, and this minimum subthreshold slope S puts a fundamental lower limit on the operating voltage and hence the power dissipation in standard FET-based switches. Here, we suggest that by replacing the standard insulator with a ferroelectric insulator of the right thickness it should be possible to implement a step-up voltage transformer that will amplify the gate voltage thus leading to values of S lower than 60 mV/decade and enabling low voltage/low power operation. The voltage transformer action can be understood intuitively as the result of an effective negative capacitance provided by the ferroelectric capacitor that arises from an internal positive feedback that in principle could be obtained from other microscopic mechanisms as well. Unlike other proposals to reduce S, this involves no change in the basic physics of the FET and thus does not affect its current drive or impose other restrictions. FAU - Salahuddin, Sayeef AU - Salahuddin S AD - School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and NSF Center for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN), Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, USA. ssalahud@purdue.edu FAU - Datta, Supriyo AU - Datta S LA - eng PT - Journal Article PT - Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't DEP - 20071206 PL - United States TA - Nano Lett JT - Nano letters JID - 101088070 SB - IM MH - *Amplifiers, Electronic MH - Computer Simulation MH - *Computer-Aided Design MH - Electric Capacitance MH - *Electric Power Supplies MH - Equipment Design MH - Equipment Failure Analysis MH - *Microelectrodes MH - *Models, Theoretical MH - Nanotechnology/*instrumentation/methods MH - *Transistors, Electronic EDAT- 2007/12/07 09:00 MHDA- 2008/04/16 09:00 CRDT- 2007/12/07 09:00 PHST- 2007/12/07 09:00 [pubmed] PHST- 2008/04/16 09:00 [medline] PHST- 2007/12/07 09:00 [entrez] AID - 10.1021/nl071804g [doi] PST - ppublish SO - Nano Lett. 2008 Feb;8(2):405-10. doi: 10.1021/nl071804g. Epub 2007 Dec 6.