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Silicon has been the champ for semiconductor materials for a long time. Some Stanford engineers may have found its successor:
Chip makers appreciate what most consumers never knew: silicon’s virtues include the fact that it “rusts” in a way that insulates its tiny circuitry. Two new ultrathin materials share that trait and outdo silicon in other ways that make them promising materials for electronics of the future.
The next generation of feature-filled and energy-efficient electronics will require computer chips just a few atoms thick. For all its positive attributes, trusty silicon can’t take us to these ultrathin extremes.
Now, electrical engineers at Stanford have identified two semiconductors – hafnium diselenide and zirconium diselenide – that share or even exceed some of silicon’s desirable traits, starting with the fact that all three materials can “rust.”
“It’s a bit like rust, but a very desirable rust,” said Eric Pop, an associate professor of electrical engineering, who co-authored with post-doctoral scholar Michal Mleczko a paper that appears in the journal Science Advances.
The new materials can also be shrunk to functional circuits just three atoms thick and they require less energy than silicon circuits. Although still experimental, the researchers said the materials could be a step toward the kinds of thinner, more energy-efficient chips demanded by devices of the future.
HfSe2 and ZrSe2: Two-dimensional semiconductors with native high-κ oxides (open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1700481) (DX)
(Score: 2) by ese002 on Tuesday August 15 2017, @06:29PM
Silicon processes stopped using SiO2 as a dialectic a decade ago. Further, with silicon dioxide was used, it was created in layers. In the simplest case, the top layer of a crystalline silicon is oxidized, leaving an insulator on top of a semiconductor. But these new materials are 2D. They have exactly one layer. If you oxidize, you oxidize all the way through. You could, of course, make the material thicker, but then it is no longer 2D and no longer has the properties that make 2D materials useful.