What Comes After Silicon?
A guide to the future materials that will power our computers
Silicon is the king of the computing world. Almost all commercial integrated circuits have been based on silicon and, for the most part, on a single basic process called complementary metal oxide (CMOS).
But the end of silicon may be in sight. Even industry giant IBM acknowledges that silicon’s days are numbered. But why? And what’s going to replace it?
There is a whole raft of new materials and partial replacements for silicon in the offing. But I could have written that very sentence two decades ago—maybe even as far back as 1980. Yet silicon remains dominant.
Let’s take a look at why it’s dominant and what materials may eventually knock silicon (and germanium) out of the hot seat.
Why Silicon?
To understand why we ended up with silicon, we need to go back to the beginning. When physicists John Bardeen, Walter Houser Brattain, and William Shockley came up with the first transistor, the material they used was germanium.
Germanium is an excellent semiconductor: It’s power efficient and can be switched very fast. But in the ensuing decades, germanium was muscled out of the mass semiconductor market because it was easier to obtain…
