This article has been adapted from this Berkeley Lab press release.
The silicon-based computer chips that power our modern devices require vast amounts of energy to operate. Despite ever-improving computing efficiency, information technology is projected to consume around 25% of all primary energy produced by 2030. Researchers in the microelectronics and materials sciences communities are seeking ways to sustainably manage the global need for computing power.
The holy grail for reducing this digital demand is to develop microelectronics that operate at much lower voltages, which would require less energy and is a primary goal of efforts to move beyond today’s state-of-the-art CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) devices.
Non-silicon materials with enticing properties for memory and logic devices exist; but their common bulk form still requires large voltages to manipulate, making them incompatible with modern electronics. Designing thin-film alternatives that not only perform well at low operating voltages but can also be packed into microelectronic devices remains a challenge.
Now, a team of Foundry users, working with staff, have identified one energy-efficient route – by synthesizing a thin-layer version of a well-known material whose properties are exactly what’s needed for next-generation devices.
First discovered more than 80 years ago, barium titanate (BaTiO3) found use in various capacitors for electronic circuits, ultrasonic generators, transducers, and even sonar.
Crystals of the material respond quickly to a small electric field, flip-flopping the orientation of the charged atoms that make up the material in a reversible but permanent manner even if the applied field is removed. This provides a way to switch between the proverbial “0” and “1” states in logic and memory storage devices – but still requires voltages larger than 1,000 millivolts (mV) for doing so.
Seeking to harness these properties for use in microchips, the team developed a pathway for creating films of BaTiO3 just 25 nanometers thin – less than a thousandth of a human hair’s width – whose orientation of charged atoms, or polarization, switches as quickly and efficiently as in the bulk version.
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“We’ve known about BaTiO3 for the better part of a century and we’ve known how to make thin films of this material for over 40 years. But until now, nobody could make a film that could get close to the structure or performance that could be achieved in bulk,” said Lane Martin, a Foundry user who led the work.
Historically, synthesis attempts have resulted in films that contain higher concentrations of “defects” – points where the structure differs from an idealized version of the material – as compared to bulk versions. Such a high concentration of defects negatively impacts the performance of thin films. Martin and colleagues developed an approach to growing the films that limits those defects. The findings were published in the journal Nature Materials.
To understand what it takes to produce the best, low-defect BaTiO3 thin films, the researchers turned to a process called pulsed-laser deposition. Firing a powerful beam of an ultraviolet laser light onto a ceramic target of BaTiO3 causes the material to transform into a plasma, which then transmits atoms from the target onto a surface to grow the film. “It’s a versatile tool where we can tweak a lot of knobs in the film’s growth and see which are most important for controlling the properties,” said Martin.
Martin and his colleagues showed that their method could achieve precise control over the deposited film’s structure, chemistry, thickness, and interfaces with metal electrodes. By chopping each deposited sample in half and looking at its structure atom by atom using tools at the Foundry’s National Center for Electron Microscopy, the researchers revealed a version that precisely mimicked an extremely thin slice of the bulk.
Next, the team plans to shrink the material down even thinner to make it compatible with real devices in computers and study how it behaves at those tiny dimensions. At the same time, they will work with collaborators at companies such as Intel Corp. to test the feasibility in first-generation electronic devices. “If you could make each logic operation in a computer a million times more efficient, think how much energy you save. That’s why we’re doing this,” said Martin.
