UAlberta electrical
engineering PhD student Gem Shoute (second from right) is the
lead author on a
research paper demonstrating a powerful new flexible transistor.
The team:
electrical engineering professor Doug Barlage, Triranta Muneshwar, Shoute
and materials
engineering professor Ken Cadien, published its work in Nature Communications.
(February 9, 2016) An
engineering research team at the University of Alberta has invented a new
transistor that could revolutionize thin-film electronic devices.
Their findings, published in the prestigious science journal
Nature Communications (read the article here), could open the door to the
development of flexible electronic devices with applications as wide-ranging as
display technology to medical imaging and renewable energy production.
The team was exploring new uses for thin film transistors
(TFT), which are most commonly found in low-power, low-frequency devices like
the display screen you’re reading from now. Efforts by researchers and the
consumer electronics industry to improve the performance of the transistors
have been slowed by the challenges of developing new materials or slowly
improving existing ones for use in traditional thin film transistor
architecture, known technically as the metal oxide semiconductor field effect
transistor (MOSFET).
But the U of A electrical engineering team did a run-around
on the problem. Instead of developing new materials, the researchers improved
performance by designing a new transistor architecture that takes advantage of
a bipolar action. In other words, instead of using one type of charge carrier,
as most thin film transistors do, it uses electrons and the absence of
electrons (referred to as “holes”) to contribute to electrical output. Their
first breakthrough was forming an ‘inversion’ hole layer in a ‘wide-bandgap’
semiconductor, which has been a great challenge in the solid-state electronics
field.