Get out of the way of silicon, you’re not our top transistor anymore. We’ve had enough of your inability to maintain electrical properties on a small scale. That’s right, we’re going to leave you. Moving forward and up to better things that can really grow with us. Simply put: it’s not up to us, it’s up to you. We’ll probably have to rename that valley as well.
We’ve had a really good run with silicon, but companies love it TSMC is looking for alternatives (opens in new tab) for a while, largely as a way of trying to keep up with Moore’s law. Moore’s law established that the number of transistors that could be fabricated on silicon doubled approximately every two years, while the cost of computers fell.
This lasted for a long time, but is dying off. Some companies like Nvidia largely considers it dead (opens in new tab)while AMD says it’s just expensive (opens in new tab) to keep pace. Regardless of where Moore’s law is now, it will come come to a halt in the near future (opens in new tab) due to the limitations of Silicon.
Satisfying, researchers at MIT (opens in new tab) have found what may well be our next transistor romance, and the good news is that silicon may stick around a bit to look at. To get those small dimensions, researchers work with substances that are so thin that they are called 2D materials. These delicate crystal layers are as thin as a single atom. The idea is to start integrating these perfect crystal structures into current industry-standard silicon wafers.
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Until now, the delicacy of these 2D materials has been a major roadblock. The method used usually involved peeling off a large amount of material, which was inconvenient and meant you had to search for the right part to peel off as it grew randomly and sometimes left defects.
Recently, the team at MIT discovered how to grow the crystal plates directly on the silicon wafers. The process uses what’s called “non-pitaxial, single-crystalline growth,” and it looks like it just might work.
So far, the team has successfully grown one of these 2D materials, called transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), on silicon wafers, without any defects in the crystal, which is huge. They used the method to create a simple but functional transistor and found that the 2D materials work well on the silicon wafers.
“Until now it has not been possible to create 2D materials in single crystalline form on silicon wafers, so the whole community is struggling to realize the next generation of processors without transferring 2D materials,” explains Jeehwan Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering. . at MIT. “Now we have completely solved this problem, with a way to make devices smaller than a few nanometers. This will change the paradigm of Moore’s law.”
The big question here, of course, is when we’ll see this technology, and there’s no word on that. No doubt there are still years of testing and trials to be done, but it is an exciting proposition for the future. Being able to build on the already existing silicon infrastructure makes this development more likely than many to find its way into mainstream goods. Plus the the future of computers looks crystal clear (opens in new tab)and what could be shinier than that?