Revolutionary Switching Devices

Professor Jason Woo

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded a multi-year contract totaling close to $7.2M to a team of researchers led by UCLA Electrical Engineering Professor Jason Woo to develop a revolutionary switching device. DARPA is an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military. The project is in collaboration with Jazz Semiconductor and other UCLA Engineering faculty including Electrical Engineering Professors Chi On Chui, Frank Chang, and Kang Wang and Materials Science Professor Ya-Hong Xie. The basic device is an asymmetric tunnel transistor that takes advantage of band-to-band tunneling to produce characteristics that include ultra steep sub-threshold slope and Ion/Ioff ratio up to 1000x better than state-of-the-art MOSFET devices. Such devices will be designed to be scalable, have the ability to dramatically reduce circuit power consumption in both the on and off states, and be capable of integration with future SOI wafer based advanced CMOS nodes. Professor Woo is leading two DARPA projects: STEEP and CERA.

STEEP Project

The STEEP project studies a revolutionary new switching device to replace conventional MOSFET in critical defense (and commercial) low power high performance applications. This new switching device fully exploits novel processes and device design to maximize terminal currents and minimize leakage, and it has the potential to overcome the shortfalls of deeply scaled MOSFETs. In this project, the researchers are proposing a novel Tunnel-Source transistor. For such a device, the ONOFF state is controlled by modulating the states available for the band-to-band tunneling. This provides an extremely sharp ON-OFF transition. In addition, when the device is ON, the channel resistance is lower than conventional MOSFETs. The researchers will examine the device design/optimization and the process technology to fabricate these high performance/low power transistors. The research will also investigate the impact of the Tunnel-Source transistor in low power systems.

CERA Project

The CERA project focuses on a revolutionary new RF transistor with graphene channel to replace conventional MOSFET in critical defense (and commercial) high performance RF applications. The new graphene channel transistors, while compatible with mainstream CMOS platform, fully exploit novel processes and device design to maximize the RF performance at very low supply voltage, thus enabling low power RF circuits that can be integrated with VLSI digital CMOS. In this project, the UCLA researchers will investigate the impact of the GraOI transistors in RF circuits, and will research novel low power RF circuit design methodologies and architectures that can take full advantages of these novel devices.