Supervisor: Brian Julsgaard

Transistors are used everywhere, from our smartphones to radios and planes. Through the years, transistors have become smaller. This has made it possible to have more transistors in smaller chips, causing computer power to grow exponentially. However, this scaling cannot continue. Electronics manufactures face several obstacles ahead, which limit how small a transistor can be made.

In this colloquium I will introduce what transistors are and how they work.  Then I will give a historical perspective of how the transistor evolved over time by introducing Moore’s law. Lastly, I will go through what obstacles lie ahead for further scaling of transistors. These obstacles include fundamental limits like the size of the atom, hot carrier effects, tunnelling and drain induced barrier lowering which introduces new noise effects in small transistors.