This does not appear to be an ingot, as silicon would be prior to being cut, but a film grown on some substrate, itself called a "wafer," so perhaps silicon?
The film itself is one atomic layer in thickness?
I don't know how you would make "wells" that form a FET, either for the source and drain, or for the larger complimentary wells of CMOS.
I don't know how advanced the thinking is to do this, or an equivalent.
There are vast lists of "better than silicon" semiconductor crystals. Most good power mosfets these days are gallium nitride, for example.
Where they all fail is production process, which amounts to transistor size, basically. Sure, you can make a really great, very efficient, measurably improved very much macroscopic transistor. But no one knows how to put a hundred billion of them on a chip, so... basically who cares?
Someday someone will figure it out, maybe. But announcing an exciting new chemistry says little to nothing.
Personally, I don't care about mass production of SOTA semiconductors. My personal computing resource needs haven't really increased in the last ten years, and I doubt they have for the median person.
I want 10 million dollar factories that can make 10 year old semiconductor chips.
It's slightly worrying that they talk about its applicability in "smart terminals" rather than personal computers. I hope that's not them saying the quiet part out loud, about the future (or lack thereof) of personal computing.
It should be noted that this is a technology for producing a semiconductor material with very high performance, but also with very high cost, a cost that is impossible to reduce, because both indium and selenium are among the least abundant elements on Earth (both having an abundance similar to silver, but being much more difficult to mine than silver, because they are very dispersed).
This material will never replace cheap materials, like silicon or silicon carbide, or even gallium nitride, in the bulk of semiconductor devices, e.g. in CPUs and memories, or in power semiconductor devices.
It will be reserved for a few high-speed devices, in special instruments that need high-speed signal processing or in radars or communication devices used in high-frequency bands (obviously these include military applications).
Selenium gets washed down residential shower drains every day in the form of dandruff shampoo. Surely if we can afford that, there's enough to go around for the semiconductor industry?
I suspect there is much less Indium and Selenium mining resources available on earth compared to silicium, so I wonder to what extent we can speak about scaling to "mass production"...
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 40.6 ms ] thread• 5–10x higher electron mobility
• Atomic thickness
• Tunable bandgap
• Lower power leakage
• Faster switching
So how big of news is this?
The film itself is one atomic layer in thickness?
I don't know how you would make "wells" that form a FET, either for the source and drain, or for the larger complimentary wells of CMOS.
I don't know how advanced the thinking is to do this, or an equivalent.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu3803
Where they all fail is production process, which amounts to transistor size, basically. Sure, you can make a really great, very efficient, measurably improved very much macroscopic transistor. But no one knows how to put a hundred billion of them on a chip, so... basically who cares?
Someday someone will figure it out, maybe. But announcing an exciting new chemistry says little to nothing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inQ9fKui5jw
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202507/21/WS687d99bca310ad07...
Is this also common for EU/USA? Do we say "UK developers new method for ..." or "Researchers at Cambridge"?
I swear I'm not making any political statements, just wondering why we treat it as a homogeneous entity.
I want 10 million dollar factories that can make 10 year old semiconductor chips.
This material will never replace cheap materials, like silicon or silicon carbide, or even gallium nitride, in the bulk of semiconductor devices, e.g. in CPUs and memories, or in power semiconductor devices.
It will be reserved for a few high-speed devices, in special instruments that need high-speed signal processing or in radars or communication devices used in high-frequency bands (obviously these include military applications).
Still, I guess I'm more interested in what Nikon is doing. Simplifying the process—eliminating the need for masks—could significantly decrease initial costs. https://www.techpowerup.com/339060/nikon-introduces-600x600-...