Nanowire electronics comes of age

摘要

For many years, semiconductor nano-wires have offered the prospect of enabling the next generation of electronic devices. But despite this promise, and some exciting preliminary developments1'2, nanowire electronics has been hampered by technological limitations. It is extremely challenging to develop a nanowire-based fabrication technology for transistors — the building blocks of electronics — that is compatible with the requirements of future microprocessors. Writing in Applied Physics Letters, Dhara and co-workers3 describe a simple technique that may change the way nanowire-based transistors are made.