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New semiconductor material investigated
On Thursday, November 26, 2020 at 12:40:36 AM UTC-5, RichA wrote:
On Wednesday, 25 November 2020 at 19:00:44 UTC-5, -hh wrote: On Wednesday, November 25, 2020 at 12:38:35 PM UTC-5, Alfred Molon wrote: In article , says... On 25/11/2020 4:41 pm, -hh wrote: On Tuesday, November 24, 2020 at 4:42:16 PM UTC-5, geoff wrote: Sounds promising. https://tinyurl.com/yxt5j7l7 It will find a niche somewhere, but don?t expect it to show up in consumer products for quite awhile. For example, GaAs and GaN have both been around for over a decade and their applications are still quite spotty: compared to classical silicone, the wafers are smaller & more expensive, plus you can easily blow through a couple Million just to optimize one?s manufacturing to get yields up. GaAs LEDs have existed for nearly 60 years. But Gallium is a quite rare element (especially if compared to silicon). Probably also much more expensive. He’s missing the point, which is just because a material exists doesn’t mean that it will “take over” the entire industry...and his own “GaAs LED” claim confirms this perspective. FWIW, one of the problems that GaAs has had which have hindered semiconductor designs is the medium still has uniformity problems with voids..it progressively trashes the wafer yield as one’s product size increases. GaN is better in this regards, but its wafers are even more expensive...it was used a few years back in a ‘DARPA Challenge’ program... think it was for a 10Gbps+ wireless link? Guy I knew who was working on it does of a heart attack, so I’ve lost track... You frequent sites like phys.org. They have a DOZEN stories a day about glad new breakthroughs in technology and almost none of them ever come to anything. No, for it depends on your timeline of perspective, Rich. For example, I've mentioned the feasibility of TPG for high performance thermal management systems in electronics more than a few years ago now, but the commercial need for that level of performance that's permanently leakproof just hasn't come about in the consumer electronics market for it to reach your level of visibility. Some major ones are increases in solar cell efficiency and new, better batteries. Even if materials do show real promise, there are too often technological, economic and even political pressures working against progress. Some of them are worthless from the start. A lot of the trip-up at present seems to be from people believing that the hard work begins and ends with the laboratory science, thereby forgetting the engineering and manufacturing aspects. That's where a lot of the recent battery work has hit "brick walls". The above comment on voids in GaAs is a perfect example: its pretty straightforward to take a wafer mask and fab a couple hundred chips and then sort through them for five good ones ... but its another thing entirely to figure out what to do about the voids so that you don't make chips at void sites so that you can get yields that make the chips affordable enough to broadly use. FWIW, one manufacturing tech project I worked on a few years ago took a "proven" chip design and went through its fab process steps ... in the end, we got the yield up from IIRC 8% to ~50% while also tightening up some performance parameters, dropping the price per chip from the $130 range down to ~$9. -hh |
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