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Nature 451, 533-534 (31 January 2008) | doi:10.1038/451533a; Published online 30 January 2008

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Device physics: Nanowires' display of potential

Hagen Klauk1

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The future of the video display is both flexible and transparent. Finding a material for the attendant electronics that is small-scale, bendy and see-through is a tall order — but a promising candidate is emerging.

Semiconductor nanowires are diminutive semiconductor crystals, generally a few micrometres long and just 20–80 nm in diameter, and could be the bedrock of next-generation integrated circuits: ultra-scaled microprocessors, terabit memory chips and the like. The hope is to exploit the nanowires' tiny dimensions to construct such devices at reasonable cost by cramming as many as 200 billion nanowire transistors onto each square centimetre of silicon substrate — which will also demand a departure from the traditional planar transistor layout1.

  1. Hagen Klauk is at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, Heisenbergstras zlige 1, D-70569 Stuttgart, Germany.
    Email: h.klauk@fkf.mpg.de

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