10 ms·

Researchers uncover the fastest semiconductor yet

167 points by g0xA52A2A 3y ago

mareko 3y ago
"This means processing speeds in devices based on them could reach femtoseconds, a million times as fast as the speeds achievable with current gigahertz electronics" That seems like quite the discovery.
- happytiger 3y ago
  > “Now that we know what structural and electronic properties are needed...there is good likelihood that we will find earth-abundant alternatives to this rhenium-based material.” Unfortunately the rarest of rare materials, but the above quote does point out that it shows us what’s possible even if it isn’t viable yet.
  - timthelion 3y ago
    Rhenium is used in industry already in metal aloys. It costs around $10000 per Kg. [1] And the US produced 8 tons of it in 2020 [2]. A modern cpu weighs 60g. If we were to make CPUs out of pure Rhenium we could make 133 000 a year at a cost of just $600 each for raw materials. If these things are really a million times faster than the current best in breed silicon ones they will have no trouble competing commercially. $600/ one million is not very much money at all and 133000 times one million is a LOT of compute. Furthermore, the CPUs will not be pure Rhinium. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhenium https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhenium [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1312513/rhenium-production-volume-worldwide-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1312513/rhenium-producti...
    - bpye 3y ago
      Also depending on how easily you can scale these semiconductors down, you may not need such complex cores. CPUs today are complex to (amongst other things) improve IPC - but if you’re really talking a 10^6 improvement in clock speed, I would guess that even a simple in-order core would perform better, and be much smaller.
      - speed_spread 3y ago
        DRAM latency will remain a problem, no way you can make CPU a million times faster without bringing in memory on the same chip. And you could probably only have a few kB close enough to the core to keep up in frequency. Most probably you'd see this tech in highly specialized interfacing circuits, like current GaAs chips.
        I_Am_Nous 3y ago
        Fiber optic regeneration could benefit from faster electricals on longer shoots, you can only amplify so many times before the noise is amplified too much to ignore so they use optical to electrical to optical circuits. A much faster electrical path could make for some really cool high speed regeneration. I can also imagine Juniper using them in an ASIC and charging a ton.
    - seszett 3y ago
      That's not really how market works though, if you could make processors that were a million times faster than current ones, there would be demand for much more than 133 000 a year and many people would be ready to pay more than 600$ for them. For comparison, I find on a random Google result that 50 tons of silicon are used per year for CPUs "in the US". The price of rhenium would skyrocket to million dollars per kg, and as long as production would stay the same (assuming it's limited by raw resource availability rather than just extraction methods) it would keep getting higher. The current relatively low price of rhenium (relative to its rarity) is simply due to low demand.
      - mhb 3y ago
        And when the price of something goes up, it is more rewarding to find and process more of it.
      - runeks 3y ago
        You seem to be reversing cause and effect. Sure, assuming (1) we can actually produce a rhenium CPU, and (2) we are unable to increase the production of rhenium then, yes, the price of rhenium will increase. But it will increase precisely because we have a working rhenium CPU in production in the first place, which is what the article disputes is possible (due to its current rarity). Furthermore, the price would skyrocket only if people are actually willing to pay a high price for these rhenium CPUs, which again means they’re worth the money.
      - lazide 3y ago
        At a million/kg, new methods of production would definitely be found. Even if it was some kind of neutron bombardment element synthesis.
      - chmod775 3y ago
        > The current relatively low price of rhenium (relative to its rarity) is simply due to low demand. For stuff previously needed in low quantities it's usually the reverse - price goes down as more is needed. Initially prices are high because manufacturing equipment has to be maintained even if idle, wages have to be paid, and because of logisticical overhead for the small quanitites. A second price drop occurs as we get into mass-manufacturing and better processes are found. Rhenium is a byproduct of mining and refinement, but I suspect it is often not captured because the small quanitites needed don't make it economically interesting - you would invest in infrastructure to extract it and immediately crash the price. That would change if there was a stable demand of higher quantities.
    - maeln 3y ago
      This ignore the law of offer and demand. If the supply doesn't change, but there is a lot more demand because now the semiconductor industry also want some, the price will shot up.
    - jiggawatts 3y ago
      Gold was extensively used in chip manufacturing previously, and wasn't cost prohibitive. The 60g figure is for the packaging, not the chip. The actual chips are tiny and weight much less than that, probably under 1g for most processors. This new semiconductor isn't pure rhenium, it's a compound, and hence less than 1g would be needed, or about $10 per chip, maximum. Realistically, this new semiconductor would be deposited as an extremely thin layer on top of something cheaper like silicon or quartz. The material cost per chip would be measured in cents.
      - adrian_b 3y ago
        The cost of depositing an expensive substance like a rhenium compound on a semiconductor wafer is significantly greater than that of the substance that remains deposited on the wafer. Depending on the kind of deposition method used, for depositing a certain amount on the wafer, a much greater quantity is used, which ends deposited on the equipment, or as chemical precursors mixed and reacted or unreacted. Due to the rhenium cost and scarcity, all the rhenium compounds that are not deposited on the wafer must be recycled. That can raise the cost a lot. Finding a compatible substrate for deposition, with an appropriate crystal structure, can be very difficult.
        happytiger 3y ago
        That’s extremely interesting. So there is a considerable manufacturing process waste factor that reduces yield. I had been thinking that viability of yield could be an issue too as it would have the same wafer fabrication yield, wafer sort yield, and packaging yield that silicon does. And as a new and profoundly expensive material there is going to be an appreciable learning curve. Is that what you’re referring to? Or is there more to it even than that?
    - tuyiown 3y ago
      Economics works in dynamics. If desirable CPUs are made of Rhenium with an effective production line and that the raw supply is so tight, the price certainly won't stay at $10000/Kg, and probably will align with equivalent computation power/watt of traditional designs. Any investor will see that it will only make miner rich without that much return miles aways, and walk away.
    - runeks 3y ago
      > It costs around $10000 per Kg. No, your source clearly says that was its peak price in 2008/2009, after which it fell to ~$3000 in 2018, and in 2020 it was $1000/kg [1]. [1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-rhenium.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-rhenium.pd...
      - adrian_b 3y ago
        The $1000/kg was a minimum due to the reduction in air traffic caused by COVID-19. It is unlikely that the rhenium price will ever return to that value. The problem is that there are no chances of greatly increasing the production, so any new application will increase the price.
  - Almondsetat 3y ago
    The rarest or rare material can still be used in extremely specialized applications though
- Simran-B 3y ago
  They also seem to say that it cannot be used directly for improving CPUs as they are designed today: > “[…] they are not necessarily compatible with current hardware used in the semiconductor industry,” […] the applications for these semiconductors “would likely be different than those for traditional semiconductors.”
- quietpain 3y ago
  processing speeds in devices based on them could reach femtoseconds That would also mean switching times that allow rectifying infrared light. I.e. capturing light energy with um-sized antennas instead of bandgap traps.
- madengr 3y ago
  [dead]
- tester756 3y ago
  Materials like that aren't new, but at this very moment they aren't viable (insane cost, short life-span, etc)
tomalaci 3y ago
I remember when people were super excited for graphene and nanotubes in semiconductors. What happened to that? Seems like a lot of things stop dead in its tracks when it comes to mass manufacturing.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- WJW 3y ago
  Mass manufacturing is really hard, it's not really a surprise that many things that we can do on lab scale can't be made to work (in an economical fashion) at mass production scale.
  - adhesive_wombat 3y ago
    We're incredibly lucky that copper and silicon are so (relatively) easy to work with. Imagine if even basic electrical systems needed wires made of rhodium and semiconductors only worked at cryogenic temperatures. We'd never have gotten over the "technological activation energy" in the 1800s.
    - WJW 3y ago
      For sure. When you look at a used car lot or a smartphone for a few hundred dollars, it is easy to forget that they are the product of a system involving (at least!) hundreds of thousands of people working together in a system that has been studied and optimized for decades. Maybe we'll eventually reach consumer grade graphene processors, but if we do it will probably take decades for the technology to advance through the technology readiness levels.
    - amelius 3y ago
      I think about this sometimes. Also, what if Pythagoras' formula didn't exist or was some king of hypothesis or a very long formula: where would technology be?
    - lizknope 3y ago
itsthecourier 3y ago
Yes, it is expensive if you want millions of chips, but imagine those militar and trading operations who would be willing to pay for that speedup as an edge, hope they manufacture something soon. I just wonder how resusable is stuff like EUV when you change the semiconductor material...
kragen 3y ago
there are lots of ridiculously expensive materials that are economic to make microelectronics you're probably reading this on a device that uses motherfucking hafnia for its dram dielectric i mean admittedly hafnium is still a thousand times as abundant as rhenium
Jacobinians 3y ago
[flagged]
xeonmc 3y ago
Could this mechanism possibly be related to the Boson Peak anomaly in disordered materials? Potentially extra acoustic excitation mode caused by interactions of transient large-cluster vibrations.
dstuessy 3y ago
Any thoughts on how manganese and technetium seem to share similar properties to Rhenium? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhenium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhenium
- adrian_b 3y ago
  Technetium has very similar properties with rhenium, but as its name says it must be made artificially, because due to its low lifetime all that has existed when the Solar System has been formed has disintegrated a long time ago. Manganese has significantly different properties (due to smaller atomic size and greater electronegativity), so just substituting it in the same chemical formula would not create the same crystal structure and any properties would be different. Nevertheless, it is likely that other substances with similar properties will be found, but it remains to be seen if any of them are stable enough and cheap enough to be used in practical devices.
dist-epoch 3y ago
> One major problem that Re6Se8Cl2 faces is that rhenium is one of the rarest elements on Earth. This makes Re6Se8Cl2 very expensive and unlikely to ever make its way into a commercial product. Something doesn't add up. Rhenium price seems to be $2k/kg. Gold price is $62k/kg. Silver price is $0.8k/kg. So Rhenium is about 3 times as expensive as silver and 30 times cheaper than gold.
- lstodd 3y ago
  I guess it's because there isn't much demand. If this takes off, prices will too.
- brudgers 3y ago
  My understanding (from binge watching Asianometry) is that the rare earth metals are not mined directly. Instead they are extracted from ores in the tailings of large scale mining operations like coal or copper and refined by specialty processors. It is not commercially viable to mine the rare earth elements on their own. Because the price is only $2k/kg, it makes more sense to build a business around all the coal (or whatever) that has to be moved to get a kg of a rare earth. Because you still have to move all that dirt. Basically, the price reflects only the costs of refining, marketing, and distribution. Extraction is sunk cost.
- runeks 3y ago
  > Rhenium price seems to be $2k/kg Based on what?
onetimeuse92304 3y ago
> One major problem that Re6Se8Cl2 faces is that rhenium is one of the rarest elements on Earth. This makes Re6Se8Cl2 very expensive and unlikely to ever make its way into a commercial product. I call BS. It is rare, true. But it is found in reasonable concentrations in some minerals (alongside molybdenum) that are already being mined and we just need to learn to extract rhenium out of it. For high perf semiconductors you only need microscopic amounts of it anyway. As to costs, majority of the costs are not in substrates anyway, however costly they are. The costs are in IP and in processing. I suspect even if silicon was as expensive as gold it would not meaningfully change the cost of current high-end CPUs that go into our phones. (edited, I mistakenly wrote ruthenium where I meant rhenium)
- foobarian 3y ago
  Ruthenium is a bit different than Rhenium. But either way you can get it online. https://www.rwmmint.com/products/rhenium-metal https://www.rwmmint.com/products/rhenium-metal
  - onetimeuse92304 3y ago
    I meant rhenium. Don't know why I wrote ruthenium, that is obviously a mistake. Thanks for pointing it out.
    - foobarian 3y ago
      I am glad you did because it led me on a Wiki chase and I learned new things :-)
      - readthenotes1 3y ago
        Did you see some dishes no longer moldy?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - 3y ago
bell-cot 3y ago
A slightly important sentence, if you're caught up on the "...using Unobtainium" issue: > Although the new material is made using one of the rarest elements on Earth, the researchers suggest counterparts made from more abundant materials may be discovered that operate comparably fast.

167 points by g0xA52A2A 3y ago

"This means processing speeds in devices based on them could reach femtoseconds, a million times as fast as the speeds achievable with current gigahertz electronics" That seems like quite the discovery.

happytiger 3y ago
> “Now that we know what structural and electronic properties are needed...there is good likelihood that we will find earth-abundant alternatives to this rhenium-based material.” Unfortunately the rarest of rare materials, but the above quote does point out that it shows us what’s possible even if it isn’t viable yet.
- timthelion 3y ago
  Rhenium is used in industry already in metal aloys. It costs around $10000 per Kg. [1] And the US produced 8 tons of it in 2020 [2]. A modern cpu weighs 60g. If we were to make CPUs out of pure Rhenium we could make 133 000 a year at a cost of just $600 each for raw materials. If these things are really a million times faster than the current best in breed silicon ones they will have no trouble competing commercially. $600/ one million is not very much money at all and 133000 times one million is a LOT of compute. Furthermore, the CPUs will not be pure Rhinium. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhenium https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhenium [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1312513/rhenium-production-volume-worldwide-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1312513/rhenium-producti...
  - bpye 3y ago
    Also depending on how easily you can scale these semiconductors down, you may not need such complex cores. CPUs today are complex to (amongst other things) improve IPC - but if you’re really talking a 10^6 improvement in clock speed, I would guess that even a simple in-order core would perform better, and be much smaller.
    - speed_spread 3y ago
      DRAM latency will remain a problem, no way you can make CPU a million times faster without bringing in memory on the same chip. And you could probably only have a few kB close enough to the core to keep up in frequency. Most probably you'd see this tech in highly specialized interfacing circuits, like current GaAs chips.
      - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
        Fiber optic regeneration could benefit from faster electricals on longer shoots, you can only amplify so many times before the noise is amplified too much to ignore so they use optical to electrical to optical circuits. A much faster electrical path could make for some really cool high speed regeneration. I can also imagine Juniper using them in an ASIC and charging a ton.
  - seszett 3y ago
    That's not really how market works though, if you could make processors that were a million times faster than current ones, there would be demand for much more than 133 000 a year and many people would be ready to pay more than 600$ for them. For comparison, I find on a random Google result that 50 tons of silicon are used per year for CPUs "in the US". The price of rhenium would skyrocket to million dollars per kg, and as long as production would stay the same (assuming it's limited by raw resource availability rather than just extraction methods) it would keep getting higher. The current relatively low price of rhenium (relative to its rarity) is simply due to low demand.
    - mhb 3y ago
      And when the price of something goes up, it is more rewarding to find and process more of it.
    - runeks 3y ago
      You seem to be reversing cause and effect. Sure, assuming (1) we can actually produce a rhenium CPU, and (2) we are unable to increase the production of rhenium then, yes, the price of rhenium will increase. But it will increase precisely because we have a working rhenium CPU in production in the first place, which is what the article disputes is possible (due to its current rarity). Furthermore, the price would skyrocket only if people are actually willing to pay a high price for these rhenium CPUs, which again means they’re worth the money.
    - lazide 3y ago
      At a million/kg, new methods of production would definitely be found. Even if it was some kind of neutron bombardment element synthesis.
    - chmod775 3y ago
      > The current relatively low price of rhenium (relative to its rarity) is simply due to low demand. For stuff previously needed in low quantities it's usually the reverse - price goes down as more is needed. Initially prices are high because manufacturing equipment has to be maintained even if idle, wages have to be paid, and because of logisticical overhead for the small quanitites. A second price drop occurs as we get into mass-manufacturing and better processes are found. Rhenium is a byproduct of mining and refinement, but I suspect it is often not captured because the small quanitites needed don't make it economically interesting - you would invest in infrastructure to extract it and immediately crash the price. That would change if there was a stable demand of higher quantities.
  - maeln 3y ago
    This ignore the law of offer and demand. If the supply doesn't change, but there is a lot more demand because now the semiconductor industry also want some, the price will shot up.
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    Gold was extensively used in chip manufacturing previously, and wasn't cost prohibitive. The 60g figure is for the packaging, not the chip. The actual chips are tiny and weight much less than that, probably under 1g for most processors. This new semiconductor isn't pure rhenium, it's a compound, and hence less than 1g would be needed, or about $10 per chip, maximum. Realistically, this new semiconductor would be deposited as an extremely thin layer on top of something cheaper like silicon or quartz. The material cost per chip would be measured in cents.
    - adrian_b 3y ago
      The cost of depositing an expensive substance like a rhenium compound on a semiconductor wafer is significantly greater than that of the substance that remains deposited on the wafer. Depending on the kind of deposition method used, for depositing a certain amount on the wafer, a much greater quantity is used, which ends deposited on the equipment, or as chemical precursors mixed and reacted or unreacted. Due to the rhenium cost and scarcity, all the rhenium compounds that are not deposited on the wafer must be recycled. That can raise the cost a lot. Finding a compatible substrate for deposition, with an appropriate crystal structure, can be very difficult.
      - happytiger 3y ago
        That’s extremely interesting. So there is a considerable manufacturing process waste factor that reduces yield. I had been thinking that viability of yield could be an issue too as it would have the same wafer fabrication yield, wafer sort yield, and packaging yield that silicon does. And as a new and profoundly expensive material there is going to be an appreciable learning curve. Is that what you’re referring to? Or is there more to it even than that?
  - tuyiown 3y ago
    Economics works in dynamics. If desirable CPUs are made of Rhenium with an effective production line and that the raw supply is so tight, the price certainly won't stay at $10000/Kg, and probably will align with equivalent computation power/watt of traditional designs. Any investor will see that it will only make miner rich without that much return miles aways, and walk away.
  - runeks 3y ago
    > It costs around $10000 per Kg. No, your source clearly says that was its peak price in 2008/2009, after which it fell to ~$3000 in 2018, and in 2020 it was $1000/kg [1]. [1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-rhenium.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-rhenium.pd...
    - adrian_b 3y ago
      The $1000/kg was a minimum due to the reduction in air traffic caused by COVID-19. It is unlikely that the rhenium price will ever return to that value. The problem is that there are no chances of greatly increasing the production, so any new application will increase the price.
- Almondsetat 3y ago
  The rarest or rare material can still be used in extremely specialized applications though
Simran-B 3y ago
They also seem to say that it cannot be used directly for improving CPUs as they are designed today: > “[…] they are not necessarily compatible with current hardware used in the semiconductor industry,” […] the applications for these semiconductors “would likely be different than those for traditional semiconductors.”
quietpain 3y ago
processing speeds in devices based on them could reach femtoseconds That would also mean switching times that allow rectifying infrared light. I.e. capturing light energy with um-sized antennas instead of bandgap traps.
madengr 3y ago
[dead]
tester756 3y ago
Materials like that aren't new, but at this very moment they aren't viable (insane cost, short life-span, etc)

tomalaci 3y ago

I remember when people were super excited for graphene and nanotubes in semiconductors. What happened to that? Seems like a lot of things stop dead in its tracks when it comes to mass manufacturing.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
WJW 3y ago
Mass manufacturing is really hard, it's not really a surprise that many things that we can do on lab scale can't be made to work (in an economical fashion) at mass production scale.
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  We're incredibly lucky that copper and silicon are so (relatively) easy to work with. Imagine if even basic electrical systems needed wires made of rhodium and semiconductors only worked at cryogenic temperatures. We'd never have gotten over the "technological activation energy" in the 1800s.
  - WJW 3y ago
    For sure. When you look at a used car lot or a smartphone for a few hundred dollars, it is easy to forget that they are the product of a system involving (at least!) hundreds of thousands of people working together in a system that has been studied and optimized for decades. Maybe we'll eventually reach consumer grade graphene processors, but if we do it will probably take decades for the technology to advance through the technology readiness levels.
  - amelius 3y ago
    I think about this sometimes. Also, what if Pythagoras' formula didn't exist or was some king of hypothesis or a very long formula: where would technology be?
  - lizknope 3y ago

itsthecourier 3y ago

Yes, it is expensive if you want millions of chips, but imagine those militar and trading operations who would be willing to pay for that speedup as an edge, hope they manufacture something soon. I just wonder how resusable is stuff like EUV when you change the semiconductor material...

kragen 3y ago

there are lots of ridiculously expensive materials that are economic to make microelectronics you're probably reading this on a device that uses motherfucking hafnia for its dram dielectric i mean admittedly hafnium is still a thousand times as abundant as rhenium

Jacobinians 3y ago

[flagged]

xeonmc 3y ago

Could this mechanism possibly be related to the Boson Peak anomaly in disordered materials? Potentially extra acoustic excitation mode caused by interactions of transient large-cluster vibrations.

dstuessy 3y ago

Any thoughts on how manganese and technetium seem to share similar properties to Rhenium? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhenium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhenium

adrian_b 3y ago
Technetium has very similar properties with rhenium, but as its name says it must be made artificially, because due to its low lifetime all that has existed when the Solar System has been formed has disintegrated a long time ago. Manganese has significantly different properties (due to smaller atomic size and greater electronegativity), so just substituting it in the same chemical formula would not create the same crystal structure and any properties would be different. Nevertheless, it is likely that other substances with similar properties will be found, but it remains to be seen if any of them are stable enough and cheap enough to be used in practical devices.

dist-epoch 3y ago

> One major problem that Re6Se8Cl2 faces is that rhenium is one of the rarest elements on Earth. This makes Re6Se8Cl2 very expensive and unlikely to ever make its way into a commercial product. Something doesn't add up. Rhenium price seems to be $2k/kg. Gold price is $62k/kg. Silver price is $0.8k/kg. So Rhenium is about 3 times as expensive as silver and 30 times cheaper than gold.

lstodd 3y ago
I guess it's because there isn't much demand. If this takes off, prices will too.
brudgers 3y ago
My understanding (from binge watching Asianometry) is that the rare earth metals are not mined directly. Instead they are extracted from ores in the tailings of large scale mining operations like coal or copper and refined by specialty processors. It is not commercially viable to mine the rare earth elements on their own. Because the price is only $2k/kg, it makes more sense to build a business around all the coal (or whatever) that has to be moved to get a kg of a rare earth. Because you still have to move all that dirt. Basically, the price reflects only the costs of refining, marketing, and distribution. Extraction is sunk cost.
runeks 3y ago
> Rhenium price seems to be $2k/kg Based on what?

onetimeuse92304 3y ago

> One major problem that Re6Se8Cl2 faces is that rhenium is one of the rarest elements on Earth. This makes Re6Se8Cl2 very expensive and unlikely to ever make its way into a commercial product. I call BS. It is rare, true. But it is found in reasonable concentrations in some minerals (alongside molybdenum) that are already being mined and we just need to learn to extract rhenium out of it. For high perf semiconductors you only need microscopic amounts of it anyway. As to costs, majority of the costs are not in substrates anyway, however costly they are. The costs are in IP and in processing. I suspect even if silicon was as expensive as gold it would not meaningfully change the cost of current high-end CPUs that go into our phones. (edited, I mistakenly wrote ruthenium where I meant rhenium)

foobarian 3y ago
Ruthenium is a bit different than Rhenium. But either way you can get it online. https://www.rwmmint.com/products/rhenium-metal https://www.rwmmint.com/products/rhenium-metal
- onetimeuse92304 3y ago
  I meant rhenium. Don't know why I wrote ruthenium, that is obviously a mistake. Thanks for pointing it out.
  - foobarian 3y ago
    I am glad you did because it led me on a Wiki chase and I learned new things :-)
    - readthenotes1 3y ago
      Did you see some dishes no longer moldy?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- 3y ago

bell-cot 3y ago

A slightly important sentence, if you're caught up on the "...using Unobtainium" issue: > Although the new material is made using one of the rarest elements on Earth, the researchers suggest counterparts made from more abundant materials may be discovered that operate comparably fast.