3 ms·
There's so much more than clock frequency. The place silicon shines isn't so much it's material properties for producing individual switches - they're good, but
by ori_b 15y ago
There's so much more than clock frequency. The place silicon shines isn't so much it's material properties for producing individual switches - they're good, but there's better out there.
It's the raw manufacturability that silicon has. It's by far the easiest material to work with. It's abundant, cheap, and easy to obtain. It's got properties that lend it to easy junction doping and easy annealing. It's easy to deposit new layers on top of etched silicon. It's got a lattice that matches up nicely with the materials you'd want to use for contacts.
In short, the advantages of silicon aren't in it's ability to make transistors. It's in it's ability to make transistors while on a high volume assembly line.
It's going to be a while if we see whether graphene can match silicon for that.
- sliverstorm 15y agoYup. It's always sobering to remember that there's already plenty of higher-performance materials than silicon- but silicon is so much cheaper to use, it simply outperforms everything else in performance-per-dollar by an incredible margin.
- redthrowaway 15y agoHow much of the ease of using silicon is due to its inherent properties, and how much is due to the many billions that have been sunk into R&D?
- Unseelie 15y agoI'm going to hazard that a lot is based on inherent properties. probably 'most' of the ease. They were mucking around with silicon computers with basically hobby chemistry sets back in the fifties and sixties, where today, with some of the best materials science we have, we're only able to manipulate graphene on the nanoscale..