Here’s What’s Next This Is the End of the Silicon Chip.

Electronics keep getting smaller, and it’s all due to electric switches called transistors. When these little fellas replaced vacuum tubes, computers went from the dimensions of entire rooms to merely the corner of an area. In the 60-odd years since, transistors have kept shrinking, lowering and powering up our electronics with them. what if we can’t make anything smaller?! Transistors have 3 terminals, a source, a drain, and a gate. Current flows from the source and, if the gate allows the electrons to pass, out the drain. Do you know how the coding system is ones and zeros at its most fundamental? level? Well, this is often where that physically happens. Current flowing through an open gate represents a one, a closed gate and no current represents a zero. Pack thousands of those transistors together and they can do calculations and act as a computer’s brain.

 Early computers had thousands of transistors, but a technique to make a more robust brain is to squeeze more transistors onto a chip, and today’s chips could have billions.  Not only do smaller transistors allow a higher density, but it also means they will switch from on to off faster, so small is good! Right now, commercially available chips typically have transistors with gates about 14 to twenty nm across, reckoning on the chip. The problem is, as gates get thinner, quantum mechanics (the physics that govern tiny parts of atoms) start to return into play. For example, if the gates are too thin then they won’t be ready to stop electrons because the electrons will tunnel through. Not during a literal sense, they don’t bore through the gate like an escaped convict. They tunnel within the quirky quantum sense, where essentially electrons disappear on one side of the gate and reappear on the opposite. Eat your heart out, Andy Dufresne. If the gate is meant to be closed to current - meaning a zero - and it isn’t, that’s a big problem. Researchers predict that the lower limit for silicon gate is 5 nm, and by 2021 it won’t be economically efficient to stay shrinking transistors. So, where can we go when the laws of physics stop the march of technological progress?

 Well, the great news is, there are other ways of improving performance. machine-learning could help to develop more efficient algorithms to use with current transistors.  we could switch to light-based computers with optical gates. That could actually boost performance 20 fold, though the hardware may be a bit larger. Or, we could stop using silicon. Researchers have managed to form a transistor out of molybdenum disulfide with a carbon nanotube gate that's only 1 nanometer across. It gets around electron tunnelling because electrons don’t flow as fast through the molybdenum disulfide as they are doing through silicon. But, production would probably be expensive, it was hard enough to create a proof of concept. The point is, progress can happen whether or not we can’t shrink. Keep in mind when transistors were first used in a computer they were 20 times dearer than vacuum tubes. Even though transistors were much costlier, computer scientists knew they'd more of upside within the long term and appearance where that led us! Watching cat videos on your phone while you avoid eye contact on your commute to figure. Make these 0’s and 1’s on your computer work hard by making your very own website with Domain.com. Special because of Domain dot com for sponsoring this episode of Seeker! Domain dot com is awesome, affordable, reliable, and have all the tools you would like to make a new website. Start sharing your ideas with the planet on knowledgeable website. Domain.com can fulfil all of your website needs.  They have over 300 domain extensions to fit your needs, from dot club to dot space, to dot family or pizza! Take that start in creating an identity online and visit domain dot com. For more about the issues with ever-shrinking computers,