Weird Science

Mike Bedford investigates how research into weird and wonderful new materials may eventually affect our everyday lives by replacing silicon at the heart of computers and other electronic kit.

- Mike Bedford

It seems reasonable to assume that advances in computer technology come about by the dedicated effort of electronics engineers and computer architects. While not wanting to detract from the contributions of these professions, we have to acknowledge that the continual quest to bring us ever faster processors requires a much more varied skill set. In particular, process engineers, manufacturing experts, quality assurance professionals and even physicists and chemists play essential roles in bringing us the advances in technology that we’ve grown to expect.

What’s more, if those experts who claim that silicon technology has almost come to the end of the line are correct in their gloomy prediction, we are surely going to need some major contributions from these other disciplines.

According to the University of Oxford, materials science is an interdisciplinary subject, spanning the physics and chemistry of matter, engineering applications and industrial manufacturing processes. Here we’re going to investigate how research into new and exciting materials is aiming to give our computers a new lease of life.

Primarily this is by developing new semiconductor materials to replace silicon if and when it can go no further, although the potential of new materials doesn’t end there. So, if your image of a chemist or a physicist is of a bearded Victorian scientist in a dingy laboratory filled with glass tubes, Bunsen burners and strange contraptions, prepare to bring your perceptions into the 21st century.

SILICON CHIPS

The phrase ‘silicon chip’ trips off the tongue with barely a thought to what it actually means, so it would be helpful, right at the start, to explain why silicon has been the driver of the electronics revolution for so long.