SYNOPSIS

TOPIC:

ROLE OF NANOWIRE IN FUTURE STOREAGE TECHNOLOGY:

SUBMITTED TO: SUBMITTED BY:

Ms. Kuljeet kaur Vanita

B40

INTRODUCTION

A nanowire is an extremely thin wire with a diameter on the order of a few nanometres (nm) or less, where 1 nm = 10 -9 meters. Two processes in nanotechnology by which nanowires can be manufactured are suspension and deposition.
Fields expected to benefit from nanotechnology include water purification, sanitation, agriculture, alternative energy (particularly photovoltaics), home and business construction, computer manufacturing, communications, and medicine.
Vertically oriented 1-D nanowire growth.
Directed growth is a critical challenge for the practical design of nanowire-based electronics. At the ACNT, we have developed a synthesis technique in which the one-dimensional nanowires are epitaxially grown in the vertical direction.
A large array of vertical nanowires can find many applications in next-generation nanoelectronics. For a logic chip for computing, these vertically free-standing nanowires are used as channel materials of MOS transistors. Examples include 3-D integration of CMOS logic gates (see Figure 2). With a surrounded gate architecture, these tiny transistors offer great scalability due to superior control of short-channel effect and leakage, providing the ideal device architecture for sub-10nm CMOS. The nanowires may also serve as interconnects and other electronic components such as diodes or resistors, making an ultra-compact integrated chip possible.
The vertical nanowire array is also a preferred architecture for ultra-dense information storage. Figure 3 shows a nonvolatile memory chip built from a nanowire array. The parallel connection of many vertically grown nanowires offers ultra-high density for future terabit-scale data storage, while operated with very fast programming and data accessing due to its parallel cell structure.
NANOWIRE-BASED LOGIC GATE(INVERTER)
The potential applications of semiconducting nanowire have two facts. On one side, with its small geometry, high mobility, and perfect surface, nanowires can be used as channel materials of a field-effect transistor (FET), extending the scaling of traditional CMOS technology to beyond what bulk silicon technology could offer. Silicon or germanium nanowire-based FETs can potentially push the CMOS scaling down to 1nm gate length, breaking the barrier for top-down fabrication technology in both logic and memory applications. Nanowires can also be used as interconnect materials. On the other side, due to its high flexibility in growth engineering, nanowires may be used to fabricate new electronic devices based on quantum effects, in which the electron tunneling is used for device operation rather than the field effect mechanism. These new generation of devices would lead to nanoelectronic systems with more compact size, less power dissipation, and higher performance.

Vertical nanowire nonvolatile memory array with ultra-high density.
At NASA Ames Research Center for Nanotechnology (ACNT), we are exploring the semiconducting nanowire-based electronic devices for both logic and memory applications, with an emphasis in high performance, low power, high density, as well as robustness for operation under the extreme environments that space exploration missions would demand.

NANOWIRE BASED ELECTRONIC DEVICES
Nanowire-based electronic devices offer great potential to implement future integrated nanoelectronic systems for both on-board computing and information storage. Future in-space exploration requirements include modular electronics which operate for long durations in radiation environments and offer performance similar to that in today's ground-based asystems.