South Korean researchers develop world's first ternary semiconductor, which may affect AI/autonomous driving cars and other applications

(Image source: Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.)

According to foreign media reports, a South Korean research team successfully demonstrated the world's first energy-saving ternary metal oxide semiconductor on a large chip on July 17. Samsung Electronics launched a 1.5 trillion Korean Won (about 1.27 billion U.S. dollars) research funding program in 2013, and has been supporting the research since September 2017 through the program.

The research team, led by Professor Kim Kyung-rok of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) in South Korea, created a ternary logic system on the surface of a large wafer using the current binary chip manufacturing process.

The new semiconductor technology could open up new avenues for artificial intelligence, self-driving cars and other high-tech applications. The research team estimates it will take five years before the technology can be commercialized.

The ternary system is a positional system with base 3. It uses the three digits 0, 1, and 2, and increases by one when every three digits are equal. This can reduce the amount of data that semiconductor chips need to process. For example, to represent the number 128, the current binary system requires 8 binary digits (binary) instead of 5 (ternary), so the ternary system can increase processing speed, reduce power consumption, and enable miniaturization of chips.

Over the past decade, the Samsung Research Foundation has provided 682.6 billion won in funding to 532 promising research projects.