Journal article
Ohm's law survives to the atomic scale
B Weber, S Mahapatra, H Ryu, S Lee, A Fuhrer, TCG Reusch, DL Thompson, WCT Lee, G Klimeck, LCL Hollenberg, MY Simmons
Science | Published : 2012
Abstract
As silicon electronics approaches the atomic scale, interconnects and circuitry become comparable in size to the active device components. Maintaining low electrical resistivity at this scale is challenging because of the presence of confining surfaces and interfaces. We report on the fabrication of wires in silicon-only one atom tall and four atoms wide - with exceptionally low resistivity (∼0.3 milliohm-centimeters) and the current-carrying capabilities of copper. By embedding phosphorus atoms within a silicon crystal with an average spacing of less than 1 nanometer, we achieved a diameter-independent resistivity, which demonstrates ohmic scaling to the atomic limit. Atomistic tight-bindin..
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Awarded by Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology
Awarded by US Army Research Office
Funding Acknowledgements
This research was conducted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (project number CE110001027) and the US National Security Agency and the US Army Research Office under contract number W911NF-08-1-0527. M.Y.S. acknowledges an ARC Federation Fellowship and support from the Semiconductor Research Corporation. L. H. is supported under an ARC Professorial Fellowship. National Science Foundation (NSF) supported nanoHUB.org computational resources, TeraGrid resources provided by the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) and the Texas Advanced Computed Center (TACC) computational resources have been extensively used in this work. The authors declare that they have no competing financial interests.