These days, we’re seeing Silicon being used less and less. Many new chargers on the market are ditching Silicon for Gallium-Nitride or GaN because it can keep the charging brick cooler, using less space. And now, that trend might make its way into chips.
A group of researchers out of China, have allegedly developed a 2D transistor that is said to be 40% faster than the latest 3nm chips from Intel and TSMC. At the same time, this chip consumes 10% less energy. This could be what China needs to bypass the challenges of silicon-based chipmaking. The researchers said, “it is the fastest, most efficient transistor ever”.
While traditional silicon-based transistors tend to struggle with miniaturization and power efficiency at these smaller sizes, this new design without silicon could offer a solution without any constraints. This breakthrough, according to a physical chemistry professor at Peking University, Peng Hailin, is thanks to the US-led sanctions that have restricted China’s access to the most advanced silicon-based transistors on the market. This has driven the Chinese to explore alternatives.
These silicon-free chips won’t be in consumer products for quite some time
We’ve been seeing all sorts of advancements in battery technology, however, very few of those advancements have made it into devices we can buy today – except for Silicon-Carbon batteries. Thus, processors in smartphones, laptops, or really anything without Silicon will likely be quite a ways down the road. But this is still a really cool breakthrough for the Chinese. It’ll be very interesting to see how this progresses over the next few years as more research is poured in.
I would not be surprised to see Huawei as the first to launch a product with a silicon-free chipset. Since the company is not able to make the latest and greatest chips, as they can only work with ARM, and not Qualcomm, Microsoft, or any other US company. Which is why we’ve seen the performance on Huawei’s products really lacking compared to the competition.
