Vanadium dioxide: A revolutionary material for tomorrow’s electronics
Phase-chance switch can now be performed at higher temperatures
Date: Feb 6, 2018
This is a vanadium dioxide chip developed at EPFL’s NANOLAB.
Credit: EPFL / Jamani Caillet
First came the switch. Then the transistor. Now another innovation stands to revolutionize the way we control the flow of electrons through a circuit: vanadium dioxide (VO2). A key characteristic of this compound is that it behaves as an insulator at room temperature but as a conductor at temperatures above 68°C. This behavior — also known as metal-insulator transition — is being studied in an ambitious EU Horizon 2020 project called Phase-Change Switch. EPFL was chosen to coordinate the project following a challenging selection process.
The project will last until 2020 and has been granted €3.9 million of EU funding. Due to the array of high-potential applications that could come out of this new technology, the project has attracted two major companies — Thales of France and the Swiss branch of IBM Research — as well as other universities, including Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in Germany and Cambridge University in the UK. Gesellschaft für Angewandte Mikro- und Optoelektronik (AMO GmbH), a spin-off of Aachen University in Germany, is also taking part in the research.
Scientists have long known about the electronic properties of VO2but haven’t been able to explain them until know. It turns out that its atomic structure changes as the temperature rises, transitioning from a crystalline structure at room temperature to a metallic one at temperatures above 68°C. And this transition happens in less than a nanosecond — a real advantage for electronics applications. “VO2 is also sensitive to other factors that could cause it to change phases, such as by injecting electrical power, optically, or by applying a THz radiation pulse,” says Adrian Ionescu, the EPFL professor who heads the school’s Nanoelectronic Devices Laboratory (Nanolab) and also serves as the Phase-Change Switch project coordinator.
