As we all know, the main material for manufacturing chips is silicon, and the vast majority of chips are made of silicon materials.
With the development of chip technology, scientists believe that when silicon-based chips reach 1nm, it is basically difficult to move forward, because this is already close to the limit of physical process.
Therefore, scientists are researching other materials to replace silicon, such as carbon-based materials, graphene materials, etc., and even turn to optoelectronic chips, quantum computing, etc., but these are not commercialized, and they are still PPT.
Recently, a scientific research team has finally manufactured the world's first graphene chip, which is mainly composed of researchers from Chinese and American universities, rather than American universities as reported on the Internet.
In this team, the American university is Georgia Tech, and the Chinese university is Tianjin University. The research was proposed by Professor Walt A. de Heer of the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the team led by Ma Lei, professor of Tianjin University and executive director of the Tianjin International Research Center for Nanoparticles and Nanosystems, undertook the research and tackling key problems.
The research team produced the world's first semiconductor made of graphene. And during the test, it was found that the electron mobility of graphene semiconductors was 10 times that of silicon.
We know that the computing power of the chip is actually determined by the speed of electron migration, if the mobility rate is 10 times that of silicon, it also means that the computing performance of the graphene chip is at least 10 times that of the silicon chip under the same process situation.
This also means that after the silicon-based chip has come to an end, the next step is to replace the silicon-based chip with graphene chips, rather than having no way out.
However, in theory, it seems to be very good, but it is not easy to achieve industrialization, Professor Ma Lei said: "I estimate that it will be another 10 to 15 years before we can really see the full implementation of graphene semiconductors." ”
Therefore, for this technology, we can only keep looking forward to it, and when we really use graphene chips, it may take 10 to 15 years, or even longer.
In addition, it can also be seen from this incident that at present, as the silicon-based chip process enters 3nm and is getting closer to the end of the physical process, there will be more and more basic research, and there will be more and more new materials.
And carbon-based chips, graphene chips and other materials are good, depending on which new material, can be quickly industrialized, which one will be king, as for those PPT materials, only theories, empty PPT, there are papers, but can not land, will slowly fall off the altar.