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What’s next for negative capacitance electronics?

Nature Electronics volume 3, pages 504–506 (2020)Cite this article

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Progress towards low-power electronics based on negative capacitance has been slow. For the field to develop, the gap between fundamental research on ferroelectric materials and the engineering of practical devices needs to be bridged.

In 2018, the total number of transistors ever made was estimated to be around 13 sextillion — that is, 13×1021 — making transistors the most abundant human artefact in history1. And this enormous number is still growing: doubling every couple of years as more chips are made with increasing device densities. Reducing the power dissipation of transistors is thus a key challenge in electronics research. There is, however, a fundamental limit to reducing the power dissipation of conventional devices, which is given by the Boltzmann distribution of electron energies and means that some electrons will have enough energy to contribute to sub-threshold leakage current, leading to power dissipation.

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Fig. 1: Roadmap for negative capacitance electronics.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NaMLab gGmbH, Dresden, Germany

    Michael Hoffmann, Stefan Slesazeck, Uwe Schroeder & Thomas Mikolajick

  2. IHM, TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany

    Thomas Mikolajick

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  1. Michael Hoffmann
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  2. Stefan Slesazeck
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  3. Uwe Schroeder
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  4. Thomas Mikolajick
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Correspondence to Michael Hoffmann.

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Hoffmann, M., Slesazeck, S., Schroeder, U. et al. What’s next for negative capacitance electronics?. Nat Electron 3, 504–506 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-020-00474-9

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