China is budgeting this plan to catch up to the US' industry by about 2030. Is there any chance that within the next 15 years, traditional semiconductor chips will become replaced by something else (whatever that may be)?
For channel materials, Intel has been using SiGe as the channel of their pmos transistors for two generations now, so in a sense elemental Si has already disappeared from the channel.
The wafers are still made of Si, half the oxide stack is still Si-O-Ni. The rest is Hf-O.
Polysilicon is still used a resistor material.
The semiconductor industry has changed a whole lot in the past, there is no "Silicon is dead moment", rather gradual shifts toward different materials used for different purposes.
Satellite radio transistors (HEMTs) already use InP and GaAs and have been for decades.
If you want an actual prediction:
Gallium Nitride and Silicon Carbide are going to be the two actively worked on materials in the near future. Both have a higher bandgap than Si, which means less leakage current and lower static power but they both come with their own problems.
There is a lot of research going in semiconductor industry, people are well aware of the problems and there tons of possible avenues of improvements on current technology (such as better lithography).
https://semiaccurate.com/2015/11/18/arm-charts-path-printed-...
These aren't better than silicon, but they probably will be close enough shortly.
After that, Moore's Law should go operational. And these have a huge advantage in terms of non-recurring expense.
Think taking all of the "maker" stuff but creating a chip instead of a PCB.
You missed the point. The point isn't to replace 14nm transistors.
The point is to allow engineers to do VLSI design like PCB design.
There are lots of interesting things that can even be done with 5um or 10um transistors, but we can't get there because the non-recurring expense is too high.
Here is an example: guitar pedals--specifically the analog delay ones. These pedals all use an ancient MN3205 bucket brigade CCD chip. The chip is dead simple to make, but since the volume is too low to offset the NRE, nobody is willing to make it.
If, however, you could design that chip with an NRE of $1,000 instead of $100,000, you could make a tidy profit. In addition, you would probably pull all of the other functions of the pedal into the chip as well.
There are also other nice benefits to using older and larger transistors. One of them is voltage tolerance. Modern transistors can't take voltages at even 3.3V in many cases, while the old 10um transistors could go to 18V (old school 4000 series CMOS was specified from 3V-18V for most chips).
The point isn't to replace silicon transistors. It's to create a completely separate market at a different volume point.
> These aren't better than silicon, but they probably will be close enough shortly.
If you had said:
> The point isn't to replace silicon transistors. It's to create a completely separate market at a different volume point.
We would have no disagreement. You changed your initial entire statement.
Like the singularity, quantum computing is always around the next corner, I think it's more than 15 years off and there are a whole lot of questions.
At a glance, China seems like they could excel at fabrication. You need to invest a lot to get going but it's been repeated, there are models to bootstrap that process. there are also more fabless chip makers than ever and they want to build stuff as efficiently as possible. As for design, that seems more competitive and there are more factors on its success (like the actual software and developers adopting your stuff) their schedule seems aggressive but there are so many middle areas. License power or arm and tweak it some, who designed that? Do a couple generations and it starts to be original work, nobody in the west will think that but I don't know if that matters
You can stack chips, make architectural improvements, etc but the exponential scaling from moore's law will be over.
Doubt it.
It boggles my mind that China went communist because of perceived gap between haves and have-nots. But now, the gap is even greater and severe, under a communist government. The more I learn about history, the more I find how history is full of ironies.