Silicon to Gallium Oxide : The Short Transitioning detail

Sending satellites to space used to take a computer, the size of a washing machine. Now that same computational power can be packed into something as small as an iPad, but as we aim for smaller devices we have reached our threshold.Our current materials and techniques may not allow us to continue to progress at this pace and because of this we’re being pushed in new and exciting directions like innovating the very stuff computers are made of. Now may be the time to say goodbye to silicon and say hello to gallium oxide. Traditionally computer chips have been made out of silicon hence the name silicon valley. A computer chip transistor needs to be conductive because it needs to be able to pass electric current through the chip but it also needs to be able to turn off that current easily so that it can send both messages – yes and no, likewise, 1 and 0. These kinds of materials are called semiconductors because they can either be a conductor or an insulator when needed. Silicon happens to be the most abundant semiconductor on earth but we have pushed silicon almost to its limit in terms of how small we can get it. we have hit the threshold of Moore’s law – An idea that the number of transistors we can fit onto a computer chip doubles every year, that was first posted in 1965 and has helped, over the decades and it is meant that computing power approximately doubles every two years but now approaching the edge of Moore’s law has meant a need of exploration into what comes next. A paper published earlier this year outlines a case for Ga2O3 or gallium oxide which may be the semiconductor we all have been waiting for one of the properties that makes this material exciting is its large bandgap. Semiconductors have their unique properties because of their band gap which is the distance between their outermost band of electrons called the valence electrons and the conduction band which is where the electrons jump to when excited to form an electric current. So silicon and gallium oxide are both semiconductors with ideal band gaps to use in computing but gallium oxides bandgap is larger, this gives it a uniquely high critical field strength and a broad range of possible connectivities ultimately making it a better future candidate for computer chip scalability. This field is brand new like a few months ago. But imagine that – all of these properties mean you could fit more gallium oxide transistors onto a chip than silicon transistors. This new material could potentially improve the efficiency of future high power electronics. These discoveries are still very much in the experimental stages.The real-world applications still remain to be seen.
Research like this into new materials and techniques gives us hope and it’s not just new materials in the same computing methods, it’s also completely new methods of computing like quantum computing and optical computing.