this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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Whats the advantage of post silicone chips?
While silicon is abundant on Earth, monocrystalline silicon is incredibly hard to produce. You need to use either chemical purification methods that use silicon compound gases, or to use a slow process that starts with a crystal seed to slowly grow giant rods of pure silicon under a chamber filled with argon gas, and many things can go wrong.
Semiconductor-grade silicon needs to be 99.999999% pure to guarantee good yields of microchips.
More on this process here:
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/15/mining-and-refining-pure-silicon-and-the-incredible-effort-it-takes-to-get-there/
OTOH, there are more (and cheaper) ways of grafene production:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene_production_techniques
(On a related note, you might be interested in the history of the transistor to know the arduous path that humanity took just to get where we are )
EDIT: Apart from the manufacturing methods, graphene might offer a way to lower the voltage required to operate. Not only that, but electron mobility in graphene is 10 times higher than in silicon.
Good graphene chips might one day require much less power than silicon, and this will be a boon for computationally intensive applications such as 3D rendering or AI.
There's still a long way to go, tho.
Thanks for the links, that's really interesting!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
history of the transistor
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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I've not gone into the deep on this yet but what I gather the basic advantages are:
Greater efficiency so cooler temps lower power consumption Higher frequency (AI,Playing Crysis) An increase in physical properties like flexibility
Can it play Crysis (better) still getting the upvotes.
There will be no classic meme slander.
Slander?! I gave him one of those upvotes!
Graphene transistors have shown to clock in THz and require less energy than silicone counterparts. First step to real quantum computers (computing by manipulating quantum states) too. C is loved there.
It's by your comment that I've now finally realised the C-alternative programming language Carbon was named as a nod to the name and element C
No, i think that's entirely because the precursors were A and B.
I'm not talking about C itself, I'm talking about the programming language Carbon, aimed at being a compatible alternative 😅