Volume 1 Issue 9, September 2018

Expensive equipment is often considered a prerequisite for good science. But the development of technology that is affordable and accessible to many could help promote a greater diversity of scientific thinking.

Nitrogen–vacancy defects in diamond can be used to visualize electric fields in an operating semiconductor device.

Spin–orbit torque can drive switching in a two-terminal magnetic memory device.

A scanning light probe can locally dope two-dimensional molybdenum ditelluride, allowing monolithically integrated circuits (ICs) to be quickly written on the material.

Through some unconventional approaches to improving transistor density and performance, the latest logic technology from Intel delivers 100 million transistors per square millimetre — and in the process, reaffirms Moore’s law.

Nitrogen–vacancy centres can be used as in situ quantum sensors to map the electric field in an electrical device based on a hydrogen-terminated diamond surface.

Spin–orbit torque switching in a two-terminal magnetoresistive random access memory cell can reduce critical write current by more than 70% compared with an equivalent spin-transfer torque device.

A laser can be used to locally dope two-dimensional molybdenum ditelluride channels, allowing both n- and p-doped channels to be assembled within the same atomic plane and for device arrays of n–p–n bipolar junction transistor amplifiers and radial p–n photovoltaic cells to be fabricated.

Developments in nanotechnology in the 1990s made building electronic devices from single molecules a possibility. Cees Dekker recounts how his team created a room-temperature transistor based on a single carbon nanotube.