Why hafnium oxide matters

39:07transition metal oxide in the famous high K dialectric constant metal gate transition that happened in like 2007. Um I wasn't aware of this obviously cuz I was in school but in 2007 like there was sort of a plateau on Moore's law because we couldn't get stuff smaller and then and then somebody decided hey actually we can use half oxide that reduces power leakage and it allows these transistors it allows these transistors to shrink even further without having a significant decrease in performance. The smaller you get, right, the harder it is to keep the same level of performance at larger >> scale. Yeah. Because you're trying to dissipate heat. The smaller you get now that the heat is starting to mess with

39:47the components themselves. And so this halfium oxide, it's CMOS compatible. It scales to very small dimensions. It switches fast and it shows really good endurance. Right? And by the mid2010s, all the major semiconductor companies, that's like Samsung, Micron, TSMC, they all have active memor development programs. and they still do. >> And and just to make just to make a quick clarification point, so chip makers were already using this for other chips prior to using it in memoristers. Yeah. >> And so part of it was like >> they had the industrial scale working with this particular material. And so

40:28they were like it would be ideal if we could use this same thing we already do at scale. >> Yeah. >> In another chip type. Is that is that is that fair? >> That's exactly right. And so the original paper that was by um Stanley Williams, that one used titanium dioxide as the transition metal oxide, but people have rapidly switched now to halfneium oxide as the sort of sandwich, the the thing in between the sandwich. Okay. Um now we've got halfium oxide. Okay, that's the meat in between the sandwich. What do we want to use for the electrodes? Usually we use tungsten and platinum.