THE microelectronic revolution thatwe've witnessed during the past decadehas simultaneously aimed at miniaturising the components of a circuit as wellas enhancing its performance. Forinstance, the Intel Pentium microprocessor is about twice as powerful asthe now vintage Intel 80386 processor,while their sizes remain roughly the same.
An important component of microelectronic circuits are capacitors, components which form thebasis of many memory devices like dynamic random access memory(DRAM) devices. Capacitors in their simplest formconsist of two metal plates with an insulator in between. The capacitanceof a capacitor can be three strategies have been tried.Extremely thin films of the dielectrichave been used but they seem to havereached their limits where any furtherreduction will result in loss of charge.The area of the plates has been increasedby several methods such as introducingtrenches or fins. But technology hasreached its limits even in this case. Thetask of increasing the dielectric constanthas also been challenging.
But now, R F Cave and others at theAT&T Bell Labs at MurrayHill, us, have reported amajor success. They havediscovered that with theincorporation of titaniumoxide into tantalum oxide(the favoured material forcapacitor fabrication), thecapacitance of the capacitor could be enhanced.The dielectric constant of tantalumoxide alone is around 35, but with theintroduction of titanium oxide, Cavaand his team have been able to increasethe dielectric constant to 126. Thisleap forward will no doubt have amajor impact on the microelectronic industry.