
The fastest semiconductor yet is a superatomic material called Re6Se8Cl2. It’s more efficient than any other semiconductor and can carry quasiparticles twice as fast as electrons move through silicon.
The superatomic semiconductor was discovered by a team of chemists at Columbia University. In experiments, it carried quasiparticles twice as fast as electrons would move through silicon.
The superatomic semiconductor could lead to computer chips that are hundreds or thousands of times faster. It could also help move data between drives faster than ever.
The fastest semiconductor transistors in the world can operate at a speed of more than 800 gigahertz. Data transfer at that frequency is measured at a scale of picoseconds, or one trillionth of a second.
Now, Milan Delor at Columbia University in New York and his colleagues have discovered a faster and more efficient semiconductor in a material with the chemical formula Re6Se8Cl2.
Computer chips are made from silicon, which is a semiconductor. Silicon is a common element found in sand. It’s both an insulator and a semiconductor, which means it can both enable and hinder the flow of electricity. Silicon is also easy to purify.
Germanium is also used in high-speed computer chips. It’s also used in fiber optic cables, plastics, infrared radiation, night-vision devices, and satellite imagery sensors.
Computer chips can become faster by increasing their raw frequency or adding more transistors
Computer chips are made in factories called fabrication plants, or fabs. The manufacturing process can take up to four months and involves hundreds of steps.
Here’s how computer chips are made:
- Sand is melted and refined to produce single-crystal silicon ingots.
- The ingots are sliced into wafers that are about as thick as a dime and several inches in diameter.
- The surface of the wafer is oxidized in a high-temperature furnace.
- A photoresist material is distributed on the non-conductive layer.
- The wafer is exposed to light through a photo mask in special exposure machines.
- The complex geometric patterns of the circuit design are transferred to the silicon wafer.
The current breed of microchips are made using deep-ultraviolet lithography. Lithography is similar to photography in that it uses light to transfer images onto a substrate.
Silicon is made from silica sand, which is made of silicon dioxide. The sand is melted and cast into a large cylinder called an ingot.The ingots are then sliced into thin wafers.
The ingots are nearly 100% pure. They are cut into wafer-thin chips that are cleaned, polished, and coated with a layer of silicon dioxide. An additional coating of a chemical known as photoresist is added on top of the silicon wafers to increase photosensitivity.
Each wafer is used to build multiple chips.
The maximum signal transmission speed of microchips is one petahertz, or one million gigahertz. This is 100,000 times faster than today’s most advanced transistors.
Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years. However, there are natural limits to how small transistors can get. The smallest chips currently in production are around 3 nanometers, and 2 nanometrer chips are expected to arrive around 2025.
MComputers have a speed limit as unbreakable as the speed of light. The reason is heat. Billions of transistors switching billions of times a second create billions of tiny puffs of heat. This adds up to a huge amount of waste energy that must be transported away from a tiny area.
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