Hacker News Reader

Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

>Is anyone else using non-silicon materials yet?

Gallium

Gallium could only produce microchips larger than silicon. What we need are diamond microchips which should outperform silicon chips by a factor of 23K and be a third smaller.

Intriguing, do you have any good references or recommended reading about this?

https://www.google.com/search?q=diamond+based+microchips

It seems we're still a long ways off from diamond semiconductors becoming mainstream. I wonder what the forcing function will end up being to dethrone silicon.

Moore's Law seems like a decent candidate.

Germanium is bigger, right? It’s used in DSP chips and now in power transformers. The fact that it’s used for high frequency circuitry has always made me wonder why we don’t do large scale chips in it. Surely cheaper than the acrobatics we are doing for <5nm, no?

It’s used in current-dense applications and leakage current is out boogeyman with silicon.

I have some background in this space in undergrad. Non Si materials are used in industry, germanium is used in some special applications and i believe its the #2 semiconducting material, however it is harder to use than Si because it's very difficult to keep it clean of impurities. Not the doping kind.

Source: I helped with a research project using Ge. Here's the paper if anyone is curious https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8653561

Reply on news.ycombinator.com