Technology
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It's only a matter of time until somebody figures out how to mass produce a computing substrate that will make silicon look like vacuum tubes. We don't need to discover any new physics here. Numerous substrates have been shown to outperform silicon by at least an order of magnitude in the lab. This is simply a matter of allocating resources in a sustained fashioned towards scaling these proofs of concept into mass production, something planned economies happen to excel at.
The United States outsourced our manufacturing, including our manufacturing design and development skill, to China many decades ago. My money’s on China.
All hanging off a Dutch company that makes arguably the most complicated machine the human race has ever built. (EUV lithography is absolutely astounding, when you have even a passing understanding of the tolerances required to make it work.)
ASML, manufacturer of photolithography machines.
Only for the highest-end, smallest-process chips, and I doubt they’ll be the world leader for much longer.
But won't you think about the silicon fab duopoly? They are the true victims in this!
They’ll get bailed out. Only losses are socialized.
My heart bleeds for them.
Oh the poor 1% what will they do...
Yes gallim arsenid transistors wold be about 10 times faster. But also about 100 times more expensive.
(Numbers pulled out of my ass.)
The cost invariably goes down as production of any new technology ramps up though.
The problrm is that this is already calulated st scale.
Silicon isn't the best material for semiconductors, it never was. What makes silicon special is that it is the cheapest material for semiconductors.
So unless there is some kind of scientific breakthrough with one of the other semiconductor materials, this equation will not change.
Silicon isn't the cheapest, sand is. The manufacturing price of the silice mono crystal is high and very similar of that from mono crystal fabrication of any other substance. Artificial diamonds as raw material isn't much more expensive, used in the industry since a long time, manufactured in mass for cutting tools, drills, abrasive material..., nothing to do with the ones for jewelery.
If you look at the price of silicon chips from their inception to now, you can see how how much it's come down. If a new material starts being used, the exact same thing will happen. Silicon was the first substrate people figured out how to use to make transistors, and it continued to be used because it was cheaper to improve the existing process than to invent a new one from scratch. Now that we're hitting physical limits of what you can do with the material, the logic is changing. A chip that can run an order of magnitude faster will also use less power. These are both incredibly desirable properties in the age of AI data centres and mobile devices.
Exept the fist transistor wasn't even silicon it was germanium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_transistor
Silicon is used because it is inherently cheaper.
Again, silicon was the first one that people figured out how to mass produce. Just because it was cheaper, doesn't mean that a new material put into mass production won't get cheaper. Look at the history of literally any technology that became popular, and you'll see this to be the case.
After considering multiple other options for mass production.
Germanium transistors are still mass produced to this day, but only for the niche products where silicon doesn't cut it.
The semiconductor industry is still constantly looking for other materials to use. Graphene is a big contender.
You act like the industry can switch to a bunch of materials and have better products but they are just too lazy to do it.
But actually more likely is that through its physics and availability silicon is just the best material for the job. Of course unless some scientific breakthough comes along but it is not here yet.
Looking into history is distorted here because you only see what succeeded.
What I keep explaining to you here is that silicon is not inevitable, and that it's obviously possible to make other substrates work and bring costs down. I've also explained to you why it makes no business sense for companies already invested in silicon to do that. The reason China has a big incentive is because they don't currently have the ability to make top end chips. So, they can do moonshot projects at state level, and if one of them succeeds then they can leapfrog a whole generation of tech that way.
You just keep repeating that silicon is the best material for the job without substantiating that in any way. Your whole argument is tautological, amounting to saying that silicon is widely used and therefore it's the best fit.
Without substantiating? I linked a Wikipedia article as a source, which explains quite a lot of the reasoning for choosing silicon.
The only thing that you reiterate here is economics of scale and you haven't provided any source that substantiates that there are other materials where the economics of scale might lead to a better and/or cheaper product.
I'm beginning to get the impression you don't actually understand what the term economics of scale means.
Then enligthen me.
I've already explained the dynamic numerous times in this very thread.
Sure but no proof an no sources. Come on man it can't be that hard to find.
Proof and sources for what specifically?
Lol. You are trolling me right? What have we been talking about?
U need sources on how/why economies of scale work, and how supply chains evolve?
Sure because apparently I do not understand how it is able to beat the laws of physics.
Oh right, the famous laws of physics that apparently decree silicon must forever be the cheapest material. Let me check my physics textbook real quick. Yep, still says nothing about global supply chains and sixty years of trillion-dollar investment being a fundamental force of nature.
Silicon is cheap because we made it cheap. We built the entire modern world around it. We constructed factories so complex and expensive they become national infrastructure projects. We perfected processes over many decades. That's not physics, that's just industrial inertia on a planetary scale.
To claim nothing else could ever compete requires ignoring how technological progress actually works. Remember when aluminum was a precious metal for royalty? Then we figured out how to produce it at scale and now we make soda cans out of it. Solar panels, lithium batteries, and fiber optics were all once exotic and prohibitively expensive until they weren't.
As you yourself pointed out, germanium was literally the first transistor material. We moved to silicon because its oxide was more convenient for the fabrication tricks we were developing at the time, not because of some cosmic price tag. If we had poured the same obsessive investment into germanium or gallium arsenide, we'd be having this same smug conversation about them instead.
Similarly, graphene isn't too expensive because physics. It's too expensive because we're still learning how to make it in bulk with high quality. Give it a fraction of the focus and funding that silicon has enjoyed and watch the cost curve do the same dramatic dive. The inherent cost argument always melts away when the manufacturing muscle shows up.
The only real law at play here is the law of economies of scale. Silicon doesn't have a magical property that makes it uniquely cheap. It just has a sixty-year head start in the world's most aggressive scaling campaign. If and when we decide to get serious about another material, your physical laws will look a lot more like a temporary price tag.
Still no source but ok.
I never said that.
True. However that doesn't mean that, at the current point of technology available to us, scaling a different material in the same way woul get us chepaper or better computing.
I never claimed that.
However this is untrue. There are regular atempts to use Gallium in silicon processing and gallium transistors are in fact already mass produced for power handling applications. So not even the scaling argument holds true about Gallium. The issue is just that gallium transistors are still inherently more costly to produce.
https://softhandtech.com/is-gan-better-than-silicon/
We would need a technological breakthrough to make Gallium viable against silicon. But with current technology it is just worse than silicon from a price/performance standpoint.
True except as I was saying and you are saying here too, we would need some kind of technological breakthrough to make graphene viable.
This is on a Level of development where they hope to have first viable products for some edge cases in the next 10 to 15 years.
https://semiengineering.com/the-race-to-replace-silicon/ https://blacksemi.com/2025/02/06/black-semiconductor-starts-fabone/
So yes in this case we could say invest all into graphene and nothing else. Which will mean that all other semiconductor innovation stops so that maybe in 15 years we have cool brand new graphene computing, or maybe not.
As explained above, in reality there is just no other option available that makes any sense. If you have any other option that will work please tell me and only me so that I can start founding my startup.
Because the big player sure as hell know that silicon shrinking is not working any more and researching for alternatives.
https://inf.news/en/science/0e165f2238a902cf3a3d5c1fbd0d316a.html
Except that is actually the case. Silicon is a widely available material that is easy to work with. And through that beats many other materials immediately.
That doesn't mean that it will stay that way forever. But it is disingenuous to say that just switching to something else will be better.
Oh I don't disagree with you here. The question is just how big will the price tag be. Because with what we currently can foresee all other price tags are still pretty enormous.
I love how you just keep repeating the same thing over and over. Your whole argument is that we need some amazing breakthrough to make other materials viable, but the reality is that it's just a matter of investment over time. That's it. China is investing into development of new substrates at state level, and that's effectively unlimited funding. The capitalist economic arguments don't apply here. If you think they won't be able to figure this out then prepare to be very surprised in the near future.
Look unless you come up with any substantiating, through sources, of your constantly repeated same argument of scale being the only thing that matters, this discussion is over.
Sources are evil because they don't have any that would prove them right. Notice how they didn't even try to, but you gave plenty. Surely that's not odd.
Can you tell me what sources you two are asking for? My argument is that economies of scale make new technologies cheaper over time because industrial processes become refined, people learn better and cheaper ways to produce things, and scaling up production brings the cost down. What are you asking me to source here specifically?
Are you seriously asking for sources for things that HAVE NOT BEEN DONE YET, that's what you're asking for here? 🤡