Nanoscale vacuum channel transistors fabricated on silicon carbide wafers

Abstract

Vacuum tubes were central to the early development of electronics, but were replaced, decades ago, by semiconductor transistors. Vacuum channel devices, however, offer inherently faster operation and better noise immunity due to the nature of their channel. They are also stable in harsh environments such as radiation and high temperature. However, to be a plausible alternative to solid-state electronics, nanoscale vacuum channel devices need to be fabricated on the wafer scale using established integrated circuit manufacturing techniques. Here, we show that nanoscale vacuum channel transistors can be fabricated on 150 mm silicon carbide wafers. Our devices have a vertical surround-gate configuration and we show that their drive current scales linearly with the number of emitters on the source pad. The silicon carbide vacuum devices are also compared to identically sized silicon vacuum channel transistors, which reveals that the silicon carbide devices offer superior long-term stability. Nanoscale vacuum channel transistors, which have a vertical surround-gate configuration, can be fabricated on 150 mm silicon carbide wafers using conventional integrated circuit processing technology.