IMEC, Toshiba claim breakthrough in biz

SAN JOSE, USA: Toshiba Corporation, based in Japan, and IMEC, headquartered in Leuven, Belgium, claimed at the International Electronics Devices Meeting (IEDM), held in Baltimore, Maryland, the United States, that they have made breakthroughs in their respective areas of operations.

At the IEDM, IMEC presented a paper on a gallium nitride-on-silicon (GaN-on-Si) double heterostructure FET (field-effect transistor) architecture for GaN-on-Si power switching devices.

Typically, high-voltage power devices are based on Si-MOSFET structures. But, for several applications, silicon power devices have reached “the intrinsic material limits.”

According to IMEC, GaN is most suited to replacing silicon power devices, on account of their high band gap properties. At the same time, the GaN power devices are costly.

Toshiba Corporation, in its paper at the IEDM, claimed that it developed a MOSFET cell, which is based on spin transport electronics (or, spintronics.). This, according to Toshiba, is a technology which uses the spin and magnetic moment inherent in electrons.

Toshiba said it introduced magnetic layers into the source and drain of a MOSFET cell, and then applied these to controlling spin direction by the spin-transfer-torque-switching (STS) method as well as gate and source/drain voltages.

A magnetic tunnel junction was applied for write operation of STS in the magnetic layers, which were formed with full-Heusler alloy – an inter-metallic that acts as a high-spin polarizer. This, in turn, paves the way to next-generation, non-volatile semiconductor devices which can be used as reconfigurable logic devices and also as non-volatile LSI chip with memory function, Toshiba said.