One-Atom-Thick Silicene Transistors May Lead To Dramatically Faster Chips

Zothecula writes: As recently as 2010, human-made silicene – an atom-thin form of silicon – was purely theoretical. But now the exotic material has been used to make transistors, and researchers have found that silicene's electrical properties lend it extraordinary potential in powering the next generation of computer chips. The new method (abstract) of creating the silicene reduces its exposure to air. "To start, the researchers let a hot vapor of silicon atoms condense onto a crystalline block of silver in a vacuum chamber. They then formed a silicene sheet on a thin layer of silver and added a nanometer-thick layer of alumina on top. Because of these protective layers, the team could safely peel it of its base and transfer it silver-side-up to an oxidized-silicon substrate. They were then able to gently scrape some of the silver to leave behind two islands of metal as electrodes, with a strip of silicene between them."

Re:By the time this gets fabbed...

[ShanghaiBill]

they'll be on to the next dope technique.

That is the way it works. R&D is a pipeline:
  Basic-Research -> Applied Research -> Product Development -> Manufacturing -> Applications
Silicene is moving from "basic" to "applied" research, and is a long way from actual applications.
But we need to keep feeding the pipeline if we want progress to continue.

this vs graphene.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I'm curious, which one gets fabbed first?

I'd be willing to bet on graphene, since we've had it for years. However, silicene might make it first because it seems like despite the fact that making it is more involved, doing it at industrial scales might be easier.

Re:this vs graphene.

[ShanghaiBill]

I'm curious, which one gets fabbed first?

Silicene has a tunable band gap. That makes it more useful for transistors. But, unlike graphene, it will spontaneously oxidize. So there are some big problems to iron out with both graphene and silicene. This research is mainly about dealing with the oxidation problem. If we can solve that, then silicene will likely "win" the race to fabrication.

Re:

[Neil Boekend]

It is possible to work under a nitrogen or argon cover gas. That won't change the manufacturing process all that much.

Transport of the wafers from one point to the other is the biggest issue. However, if the wafer trays are redesigned to prevent leaks then this isn't an issue. I expect that manual wafer handling is not done in most modern fabs so a nitrogen or argon cover gas won't change much in the movement to and from the trays.
Racks with wafer trays may need a nitrogen downflow instead of the cleanroom

Re:this vs graphene.

[infogulch]

The problem is graphene has no band-gap, so it's pretty useless as a transistor (unless it's heavily doped I suppose). That's not to say it can't be doped, or that there aren't any uses for graphene other than transistors.

Re:

[ArcadeMan]

But with the high cost of drugs, won't that make it even more expensive?

Re:this vs graphene.

[pla]

Graphene has the unfortunate property that transistors using it don't actually have an "off" mode - Just a "low" and "high". So although it might give us crazy-fast switching times, it will leak current worse than an XFinity modem. But hey, we all miss the good ol' days of using our P4 gaming rigs as space heaters, right?

Silicene, by comparison, does have a tunable band-gap, meaning that it should get around that limitation of graphene.

Re:

[Crashmarik]

Silicene hands down. Silicon is incredibly well understood and already has a tremendous infrastructure in place to support it.

Re:

[Neil Boekend]

Silicon and silicene are about as different as coal and diamond. Much of the experience with silicon is as applicable to selicene as it is to graphene.

Re:

[NMBob]

The first picture in the abstract link shows it. The description above is a bit confusing.

Re:

[bugs2squash]

Don't they need three electrodes for a transistor ?

Re:

[ArcadeMan]

You just confessed to having a small dick and suffering from premature ejaculation. Congratulations!

Re:

[sexconker]

You just confessed to having a small dick and suffering from premature ejaculation. Congratulations!

Don't forget the worst bit - he fucked AC's mom. She's straight 90s OOGLAY.

Mechanical stability?

[DoofusOfDeath]

I don't have any kind of physics background, so maybe someone can explain this to me.

If you have a single-atom-thick layer of some material, how much of a bump can it withstand before the sheet gets ripped apart? I would imagine even a small vibration of the material, such as dropping the overall package on a desk, would ruin it.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

A piece of wet tissue paper is exceedingly fragile to handle.

Now place that piece of tissue paper in the middle of a thick book and close it. You toss the book in your backpack and stomp on it, and the tissue paper will be still be intact.

Re:

[unixisc]

Wouldn't it be deposited on some sort of substrate to avoid exactly that problem? Not to mention, if made into an IC, it would need to be packaged, and there, thinner would be better in terms of the packaging. However, the handlers would have to be really delicate to handle such thin die. In short, packaging would be a lot more expensive, unless they figure out a way to get volumes out of this one

Re:

[denobug]

In short, packaging would be a lot more expensive, unless they figure out a way to get volumes out of this one

Getting volumes out is exactly what the manufacturing engineering will be doing, and usually involves a bigger slice of wafer to increase yield.

Re:

[BoRegardless]

Going to have to be a lot of error checking to get fault tolerant.

Re:

[kesuki]

as i understand the ceramic or silver substrate will bond it and make it stable enough for use as a microchip.

Another one?

[fey000]

Now it's just getting sili

Re:

[crypticedge]

Wrong story.

Very very small rolling pins?

[CODiNE]

How does one get the initial flat surface to deposit things on?