New Microchip Breakthrough: Scaling Beyond 1nm

Secure your privacy with Surfshark! Enter coupon code anastasi for an extra 3 months free at surfshark.deals/anastasi ‼ Sorry guys, I messed up. I meant quantum INTERFERENCE, not inference. It was a long day 😅

The molecular structure in the center of their figures is a porphyrin ring structure. It has lots of interesting features and crops up all over nature when moving electrons around. It's been a candidate for cool logic and transistor designs for decades. For example in [Barker, J.R., 1987. Prospects for molecular electronics. Microelectronics International, 4(3), pp.19-24 , doi:10.1108/eb044287 ] Figure 5 reports a NAND gate where the central structure is the same as here but it has a much larger overall structure for doing things optically. (Hope that is interesting!)

Porphyrins are organometallic structures found in biology. The ring holds a metal ion in its center. In animals, the metal atom is iron and the porphyrin is at the heart of hemoglobin in blood. In plants, the metal atom is magnesium and the molecule is chlorophyl, which captures light energy in photosynthesis. In your video, the molecule between source and drain is a porphyrin where the metal is zinc. I don’t know what characteristics of this porphyrin ring structure makes it a good FET channel.

You do an incredible job of making complex concepts simple to understand. "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." - Albert Einstein

I've made zinc porphyrins for a year during my master thesis!! 😃😃 (it was for a completely different reason though, it was for renewable energy) Zinc porphyrins are actually quite easy to find commercially or synthesize, and the molecule there presented doesn't look too different from some of the ones I worked with. I could see it scaled up.

I'm an old chip designer myself , worked at Intel in the old days - then S3 ... I thought your talk was excellent The idea can be applied to other materials and higher temperatures. It's quite profound.

Back in 1987 or so, I worked at a place that was using a process called Molecular Beam Epitaxy, MBE. They were using it to build GaAs transistors directly on a ceramic substrate. For the time, very fast, I didn't realize how fast until I overheard some people saying that they were getting a 9db gain @ 60 ghz! I asked where they found a scope that could read a 60ghz signal. They told me they didn't, that they had to extrapolate from sub harmonics. Saw some strange stuff there! Not aliens or anything, just people pushing boundaries.

It's a fascinating idea. LIGO can measure 1/10,000 the width of a proton using interference. Wavelengths can be far smaller than a nanometer. If we start building transistors that work at these scales, this is like putting us in the position of PCs in 1980 again in terms of Moore's Law, and we would be on the verge of a whole new paradigm in computing.

Well. You got me considering learning more about transistor and quantum tech in my free time.

I worked in the semiconductor industry working in plant automation and data collection for close to 30 years. The technology was astonishing back then...it is mind blowing now! I enjoy your channel immensely! 😊

To those complaining regarding pronunciation - English is clearly not her first language - stop obsessing and just listen to the content without adding comment. It's perfectly understandable and very interesting.

"Inference" and "interference" are very similar, but not the same word :-)

Always interesting stuff, especially as it’s right at the cutting edge of transistor development. Why do I enjoy your channel? Well who else can say the phrase “Let me simplify this to the most basic level” and then you start a discussion on sinusoidal constructive and destructive interference as it applies to wave/particle duality and quantum tunneling…Love it! Keep up the good work :-)

this is just amazing! i'm not from a technical background and am more of a software guy, i've always wondered what would happen after they reach the 1nm limit. It seems like we've got a long adventure ahead with our normal computers.

Plants do very interesting things with porphyrins. Chlorophyll is a porphyrin (as is heme, a component of haemoglobin) and chlorophyll of course enables photosynthesis in plants, without which there would be no oxygen in the world and we would all die. Take home message: 1) porphyrins are amazing 2) we must protect and preserve our plants and trees :)

Super interesting, thanks! In the how it works section, I think the word is "interference", rather than "inference".

I’ve been absent from YouTube for a while and coming back your content. It has taken a quantum leap 😊 in production quality and presenting. I personally would like more cat tho.

I love your videos. The visuals compliment your narration so i learn stuff AND find them entertaining

Your channel is so underrated. Just keep up those uploads people will catch onto how brilliant you are. <3

I used to work in this space and I can tell you: The fact we have no ability to use much of our silicon manufacturing technology means this tech could be more than a decade from practical implementation. This is not just one exotic material, but two or possibly several to get this type of device working. The graphene interconnect is actually more annoying to fabricate than the transistor, because you can functionalize the higher surface energy edges, but making a large and highly ordered graphene lattice is hard. CVD and Osborne ripening can only get us so far it seems. Practical implementation would only be in data centers The need for cryogenic temperatures to make this work is also a major challenge. That means for a while, this will not be accessible to consumer devices. This tech will languish the same way standard quantum computer have for the last several years. This tech may not help us quite keep up with Moore's law, but we will use it or a permutation of it eventually.