As Moore's Law slows down, a look at 2D materials like graphene, which is already being used to create flexible electronics and could replace silicon in chips
Graphene's immediate commercial foothold is flexible electronics, not logic chips — the near-term beneficiaries are device makers wanting bendable or conformal products, while silicon chipmakers are unaffected today.
Second-order effects
Gallium nitride emerges as the nearer-term silicon substitute precisely because it drops into conventional fabs, forcing the 2D-material camp to justify a new manufacturing ecosystem rather than just better physics.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, the post-Moore industry splits into parallel material bets — EUV-extended silicon, fab-compatible compounds like GaN, and long-horizon 2D materials — with manufacturing cost, not lab performance, deciding which replaces silicon first.
The trend: As silicon scaling stalls, the chip industry is diversifying from one roadmap into parallel material-substitution bets, with fab compatibility as the filter that separates near-term winners from lab promises.
That's right! And @sandtChemistry at @MissouriSandT is doing some great work with 2-D wonder materials known as #MXenes. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
I've written something like 350 columns for the Journal in my nearly 7 years here, but this is the one that had me the most excited about the future. The future is WEIRD. And the range of materials we will build it out of is *vast* https://www.wsj.com/...
From the “We Live in the Future” files 🧪Exotic new materials are being added to silicon microchips to give them superpowers: 📷Infrared cameras in smartphones 🦠Real-time detection of SARS-CoV-2 *in the air* 📱10x improvements in speed, performance https://www.wsj.com/...
Very informative article in @WSJ by @mims. Thanks for mentioning some of our views. Graphene and Beyond: The Wonder Materials That Could Replace Silicon in Future Tech - WSJ https://www.wsj.com/...
Great article by @mims with great quote from @deep29jariwala Move over, silicon: 2-D wonder materials like graphene are gearing up to lead the next innovations in microchips @PennEngineers https://www.wsj.com/...
Crazy thing about graphene and other “2D” (single-atom-thick) materials is they were characterized less than 20 years ago. But they are *already* being incorporated into devices, from optical sensors to smartphones. And it's just the beginning. https://www.wsj.com/...