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Are gallium based chips completely non-viable or something? I thought they were the next big thing in chip materials that would let us get past the Moore's law
by DannoHung 11y ago
Are gallium based chips completely non-viable or something? I thought they were the next big thing in chip materials that would let us get past the Moore's law restrictions in silicon?
- vjoshi 11y agoAgree, Lidow's championing of gallium (along with many others) is far from going unnoticed. Some people are still however caught up on the cost aspect and feel the economies of scale silicon based chips have are too high to break. Frankly, this is just not true anymore...
- CydeWeys 11y agoI don't think the author of this article knows about them, or they didn't fit into the narrative.
- kragen 11y agoAccording to the USGS, gallium arsenide use is higher than ever, but it remains niche, because it's just a minor tweak to the silicon bandgap structure, especially for bipolar circuits, where people have been fabricating high-performance CPUs in it since the 1980s. It doesn't work even adequately for CMOS, but even if it did, it doesn't solve the problems with Dennard scaling. If you're looking for exotic materials to bail us out, it might be a little less hopeless to look to diamond or to high-temperature semiconductors.
- sliverstorm 11y agoThey are really, really expensive to make compared to silicon, and I want to say they run hotter (but my memory is fuzzy). Silicon has never really been the most ideal material for transistors, but it has always been so cheap in comparison to be the most cost effective. The joke about GaAs is that it will always be the material of tomorrow. (They've been using it in lab settings for decades)