This New Semiconductor Could Revolutionize Computing

researchers at the Georgia institute for technology have found a new semiconductor that's a really good candidate for making computers faster and smaller than ever let's have a look in 1965 Gordon Moore one of the brains behind Intel noticed that the number of transistors on a microchip was doubling roughly every 2 years it's become known as Mo law and it has roughly remained valid until a year ago or so when Nvidia declared Mo law dead the problem is that by now the size of transistors that are the elementary logic components of computers are mere nanometers and size and it's becoming increasingly difficult to squeeze more of them into smaller space you see the issue is that transistors are getting close to the size of single atoms at that point quantum physics becomes important and that makes things much more complicated doesn't make it impossible to shrink things down further but You' need to to come up with something entirely new sure enough researchers are working on entirely new stuff such as spintronics or Quantum dots Etc but these are still quite far in the future and from a manufacturing perspective they're somewhat unappealing because that require many changes the path that most chip makers are pursuing for the moment is to stack transistors on top of each other at present transistors are etched into flat silicon surfaces next to each other but if you could stack them then you could get more computing power into small spaces and that would continue more slow if by other means than previously if you stack transistors however you get a new problem which is that they just get too hot one way you can try to address this issue is with some sort of cooling technology like tiny Channels with liquids or such but again the issue is that from a manufacturing perspective this is unappealing because you can't continue producing your microchips as previously the most convenient thing you could do to continue more slw is to find material for transistors that's better at giving off heat than silicon but that can largely be used with the existing Production Technologies and we know such a material it's graphine you've probably seen images of graphine it's a single layer of carbon atoms set up in a honeycom pattern the great thing about graphine is that it gives off heat enormously well so it's rather unsurprising that the idea of graphine transistors has been around ever since the material was discovered in 2004 but while graphine is good at giving up heat and is very good at conducting electricity it's unfortunately not a semiconductor you see a semiconductor is the material to which you can apply a current to make it switch from a non-conducting to a conducting state for this you need what's called a band Gap in the electron bands if you apply sufficiently High current that'll Propel electrons to the upper band and the semiconductor will conduct that's why you can use them as logical elements because you can switch them on and off but graine doesn't have a good band Gap graphine is considered a quasi metal because while it strictly speaking isn't a metal it conducts electricity much like one and this means it can't fulfill the function of a transistor to act as a switch at least not the way it is scientists have come up with several ways to try and fix that for example they've used graphine rolled up to tubes called carbon nanot tubes these can be switched between conducting and non-conducting by twisting them and that can be used to make transistors from them but the issue is again that producing these nanot tubes and using them to build microchips is too cumbersome for mass production the authors of the new paper not did something completely different they grew a layer of graphine on Wafers of silicon carbide silicon carbide itself is a semiconductor and it's one with a pretty big band Gap basically they figured out that they can combine the silicon carbide with the graphine to get a stable material that both has a band Gap and still gives off heat 10 times better than silicon they have also very thoroughly documented exactly how they produce the material and have tested that it strong and stable enough to be used for transistors this is pretty exciting honestly after 20 years of graphine talk that didn't amount to much it could finally go somewhere but it's a long way from the laboratory to the shopping mall and many nice ideas have died on that path so I'm afraid we'll have to wait a little longer until we can breathe transistors together with the microplastics I also have some interesting news from YouTube which is that it's now possible to make a video available to channel subscribers first in the future we'll be doing this with all news items so if you join this channel you'll get to see them as soon as we've uploaded them thanks for watching see you tomorrow

Channel: Sabine Hossenfelder

Views: 417,702

Keywords: science without the gobbledygoook, hossenfelder, science news sabine, science humor, moore's law is dead, moore's law, semiconductor, tech news, graphene, graphene semiconductor, graphene transistor, graphene computing, new graphene technology, graphene technology, tech, technology, short science video, short science video clips

Id: oXBtPmVrES4

Length: 5min 20sec (320 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 09 2024