The development of high-performance alternatives to silicon in microelectronics has been brought nearer by researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa who stretched an oxide material at an atomic level, thus controlling its conductivity. They said this is a “milestone advancement towards making efficient switches, which are the basic building blocks of computer chips.”
Researchers in the Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering have been able to control an emerging material that they regard as a possible future alternative to silicon in microelectronics. This is a timely development, because scientists and engineers face challenges in continuing the transistor shrinking trend – an important driver of computer chip performance. They published their findings in the journal Advanced Functional Materials under the title “Bandwidth Control and Symmetry Breaking in a Mott-Hubbard Correlated Metal.”
Integrated circuits, more commonly known as computer chips (or simply chips) are at the core of modern life, responsible for processing, storing and transferring massive amounts of data. Chips are involved in countless tasks including vaccine development, spacecraft designs, Internet infrastructure, big data, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things.
The continuous performance improvement of these chips has been driven by shrinking the size of the most basic logic “Lego” piece – the transistor, which is a miniature switch that controls the flow of electric currents; this is analogous to a faucet controlling the flow of water.
Already in the early 1960s, Intel founder Gordon Moore suggested that the transistors’ miniaturization rate should allow doubling of the number of transistors per area every two years. This prediction, named “Moore’s Law,” has dictated the miniaturization rate for decades. Modern chips now contain billions of transistors on about a square centimeter. In 2007, Moore declared that his law would come to an end within a few years. The CEO of Nvidia expressed an even more pessimistic view last year, saying that “Moore’s Law is dead,” a view shared by other technology experts.
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