Cheap Metal-Insulator-Metal (MiM) Diode Created 137
An anonymous reader writes "Progress on metal-insulator-metal diode manufacturing was just reported online in the professional journal Advanced Materials (abstract). For the first time a high-performance 'metal-insulator-metal' diode was created with cheap materials. This is a fundamental discovery. It could change the way manufacturers produce electronic products at high speed, on a huge scale, and at a very low cost, even less than with conventional methods."
Re:Ground breaking (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Fundamental discovery? (Score:4, Interesting)
But isn't a transistor just a diode with a way to control the junction? So maybe you could position a third wire and get some gain out of it.
Re:Ground breaking (Score:5, Interesting)
Mainly, most immediately, it gives you an additional way to make a diode or diode-based structure when you're designing your fabrication sequence. Fabrication on the foundry / mass-production level occurs through processes which give you pretty much a set sequence of layers (deposited materials, treatments, patterning, etching, etc.). You can make anything you can design within that process...and most anything else usually stays in a research lab.
The extraordinarily common CMOS process involves numerous metal layers "high" above the wafer (numerous layers intervene). These are separated by insulators. Normally, you make diodes at the wafer layer where you're doing your doping.
MiM means you can put diodes in regions of your chip where they couldn't practically be fabricated before without a lot of time doing a one-off chip in a lab. With "a lot" often being several months to a year, assuming everything turns out perfectly, assuming your lab even HAS all the necessary equipment, and assuming you don't have something better to do - which is rare if you're not still a grad student.
Re:Ground breaking (Score:2, Interesting)
And even though everything about the process will be cheaper, faster and better, the 'cheaper' part will magically disappear through the use of patent fee's.
Re:Ground breaking (Score:3, Interesting)
This might be true, but looking at the thesis linked below the main target seems large area/feature size devices devices such as TFT display backplanes and drivers.
Displays? Meh. (Score:4, Interesting)
That may be where the money is but the interesting applications are elsewhere. For example, MiMs could be useful as mixers and detectors all the way up to the visible. If they can be fabricated with a negative-resistance region they could serve as oscillators over the same range.