Encore: Beyond Silicon? The New Materials Charting the Future of Microchips

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The Wall Street Journal

Technology

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2023

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Microchips are in pretty much all of our electronic devices—if it’s got a plug or a battery, it’s probably got a chip. For the past 60 years, most of these have been made of silicon. But new devices demand faster, better, and more efficient processors, and engineers are hitting silicon’s physical limits. In this encore episode of the Future of Everything, WSJ’s Alex Ossola digs into the future of chips—how scientists are boosting silicon’s capabilities and looking for other materials that could take its place. Further reading: Graphene and Beyond: The Wonder Materials That Could Replace Silicon in Future Tech The Microchip Era Is Giving Way to the Megachip Age Chips Act Will Create More Than One Million Jobs, Biden Says Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:00.0	Join the Wall Street Journal online October 12th for WSJ Pro Sustainable Business Forum
0:05.9	and take away practical advice on how to build a sustainability strategy that's right for your business.
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0:18.8	slash Sustainable Business, no code required. That's WSJ.com slash Sustainable Business.
0:25.5	In the early days of computers, it took a whole room of machinery to perform even simple calculations.
0:35.2	And then, in 1961, came a huge, tiny revolution.
0:39.9	Here is a packaged integrated circuit. Inside this package, here's a chip of silicon,
0:45.6	which provides the electrical equivalent of many transistors, resistors, and diodes,
0:51.2	all interconnected to provide the desired function. Silicone ships were a breakthrough.
0:56.2	They were small and incredibly efficient.
1:00.0	60 years later, they've only gotten better. I mean, I have a supercomputer in my pocket right now.
1:05.6	It unlocks by recognizing my face, it tracks my location, it can make a whole movie,
1:10.8	and I use it to call my mom. I had seen pictures of microchips, but I had never actually held
1:18.5	one in my hand. Recently, though, I decided to change that.
1:22.8	My boyfriend let me crack into one of his old phones to take a look at what's inside.
1:26.3	Are we going to know the chip when we see it?
1:29.0	I know what a chip looks like. You do?
1:32.2	All right.
1:33.0	The phone's processor looks like a small black square about the size of my fingernail.
1:37.6	And like most chips in the devices we have, this one is still made out of silicon.
1:42.4	But in the past few years, scientists have started hitting the physical limits of that material.
1:47.6	We have reached a point that even though you can keep shrinking silicon,
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