JERUSALEM: Israeli researchers and their partners have engineered a new material that could replace silicon, the Israel Institute of Technology said in a statement on Monday, reported Xinhua.
The material can be used to create a new type of transistors for manufacturing chips, replacing the silicon ones, whose functions are limited due to their tiny dimensions, said the statement.
The transistor, which drives the running of the chip by controlling the passage of electric current, has been reduced in size over the years to tens of atoms, allowing one chip to contain billions of transistors.
However, recently, the miniaturisation trend of silicon transistors has slowed down as researchers found that the transistors, at reduced sizes, behave in ways that could harm the processor’s operation, causing problems such as leakage of electric current when switching off the transistor.
The miniaturisation of silicon transistors also causes energy waste, such as the rapid draining of cellphone batteries and the heating of devices.
On the scale of server farms, this means huge energy consumption and huge heat released into the atmosphere, the researchers noted.
In a study published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, the team grew oxide in a unique lab system while achieving an effect on its conduction and insulation properties to create efficient and precise transistors.
The researchers achieved control over the distance between the new material’s atoms with a precision of a picometer, or a thousandth of a nanometre, while the distance between two atoms in silicon, for comparison, is about a quarter of a nanometre.
The future transistors will turn on and off quickly through precise control of the material and its atomic structure, the researchers concluded. – BERNAMA-XINHUA
