Discuss the limitations of traditional silicon devices
Answers
The semiconducting silicon chip launched the revolution of electronics and computerisation that has made life in the opening years of the 21st century scarcely recognisable from the start of the last. Silicon integrated circuits (IC) underpin practically everything we take for granted now in our interconnected, digital world: controlling the systems we use and allowing us to access and share information at will.
The rate of progress since the first silicon transistor in 1947 has been enormous, with the number of transistors on a single chip growing from a few thousand in the earliest integrated circuits to more than two billion today. Moore’s law – that transistor density will double every two years – still holds true 50 years after it was proposed.
Nevertheless, silicon electronics faces a challenge: the latest circuits measure just 7nm wide – between a red blood cell (7,500nm) and a single strand of DNA (2.5nm). The size of individual silicon atoms (around 0.2nm) would be a hard physical limit (with circuits one atom wide), but its behaviour becomes unstable and difficult to control before then.
Without the ability to shrink ICs further silicon cannot continue producing the gains it has so far. Meeting this challenge may require rethinking how we manufacture devices, or even whether we need an alternative to silicon itself.
Speed, heat, and light
To understand the challenge, we must look at why silicon became the material of choice for electronics. While it has many points in its favour – abundant, relatively easy to process, has good physical properties and possesses a stable native oxide (SiO2) which happens to be a good insulator – it also has several drawbacks.
For example, a great advantage of combining more and more transistors into a single chip is that it enables an IC to process information faster. But this speed boost depends critically on how easily electrons are able to move within the semiconductor material. This is known as electron mobility, and while electrons in silicon are quite mobile, they are much more so in other semiconductor materials such as gallium arsenide, indium arsenide, and indium antimonide.
The useful conductive properties of semiconductors don’t just concern the movement of electrons, however, but also the movement of what are called electron holes – the gaps left behind in the lattice of electrons circling around the nucleus after electrons have been pushed out.
Modern ICs use a technique called complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) which uses a pair of transistors, one using electrons and the other electron holes. But electron hole mobility in silicon is very poor, and this is a barrier to higher performance – so much so that for several years manufacturers have had to boost it by including germanium with the silicon.
Silicon’s second problem is that performance degrades badly at high temperatures. Modern ICs with billions of transistors generate considerable heat, which is why a lot of effort goes into cooling them – think of the fans and heatsinks strapped to a typical desktop computer processor. Alternative semiconductors such as gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC) cope much better at higher temperatures, which means they can be run faster and have begun to replace silicon in critical high-power applications such as amplifiers.
Lastly, silicon is very poor at transmitting light. While lasers, LEDs and other photonic devices are commonplace today, they use alternative semiconductor compounds to silicon. As a result two distinct industries have evolved, silicon for electronics and compound semiconductors for photonics. This situation has existed for years, but now there is a big push to combine electronics and photonics on a single chip. For the manufacturers, that’s quite a problem.