At this year's 19th edition of the conference, held in Mondsee, Upper Austria, Dr. Masiar Sistani from the Institute of Solid State Electronics won the "Young Scientist Award" for his research topic "Programmable Negative Differential Resistance in Ge Nanowire Transistors". The prize and 400€ were awarded by an expert jury consisting of international researchers and representatives of the semiconductor industry.

The presented work is about novel adaptive transistors that can be dynamically switched during run-time to execute different logic tasks as needed. This changes the possibilities of chip design quite fundamentally and opens up completely new opportunities in the field of artificial intelligence, neural networks or even logic that works with more values than just 0 and 1. To do this, a transistor design with multiple control electrodes that dynamically program the function of the transistor was applied. "The fact that we use germanium is a key advantage," says Dr. Masiar Sistani, who is a university assistant in Prof. Walter Weber's group at the Institute of Solid State Electronics at TU Wien. Due to the electronic structure of germanium, the current flow in the transistor initially increases as the voltage rises, as one would expect based on Ohm's law. Above a certain threshold, however, the current flow decreases again - this is referred to as negative differential resistance. The threshold voltage of this effect can be modulated by the control electrode. This results in various degrees of freedom that we can use to give the transistor exactly the properties we need at the moment," says Masiar Sistani.

Prof. Weber's research group exists only for about three years at the TU Vienna. Prof. Walter Weber has established an international reputation for his work on novel reconfigurable electronics. Dr. Masiar Sistani is an expert in the field of germanium electronics and focuses on the study of electronic transport phenomena. These two areas of expertise now came together to create the adaptive germanium transistor, for which Dr. Masiar Sistani received the "Young Scientist Award" at the GADEST conference. "Some details still need to be optimized, but with our first programmable germanium transistor we have succeeded in proving that the basic idea actually works. This is a decisive breakthrough not only for us, but also for future industrial developments," says Masiar Sistani.

Original Publication:
M. Sistani et al., Nanometer-Scale Ge-Based Adaptable Transistors Providing Programmable Negative Differential Resistance Enabling Multivalued Logic, ACS Nano
Referenz der Publikation: ACS Nano 2021, 15, 18135–18141
Link zur Publikation: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsnano.1c06801, opens an external URL in a new window

Contact
Univ.Ass. Dipl.-Ing. Dr.techn. Masiar Sistani
Institut für Festkörperelektronik
Telefon +43 1 58801 36213
E-Mail masiar.sistani@tuwien.ac.at