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China Just Made the World's Fastest Transistor and It Is Not Made of Silicon
(www.zmescience.com)
silicone parts are made for toys
this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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better keep my hellochinese streak alive i guess
Everyone just needs to accept this is the Chinese century.
There is no point in fighting it, they're better than the americans, they're not using their dominance in a bad way, just go with it and reap the benefits.
This will be in mass production and have proven itself within a year. They're not going to fuck around with this.
esp considering its one of the only industries they are still behind in. i doubt they are sparing any expense at all to make better computer chips than the us.
Not viable because bismuth is radioactive. We're not moving away from silicon anytime soon, I mean we've heard of the hype stories about gallium nitride and carbon nanotube transistors every few months now for nearly a decade, yet almost everything still uses silicon.
We’re not moving away from silicon anytime soon, I mean we’ve heard of the hype stories about gallium nitride and carbon nanotube transistors every few months now for nearly a decade
I mean, I work with transistors and gallium nitride transistors are actually a thing. Like you can just buy them yourself. I've looked through a few examples and they seem pretty decent. Certainly there are much fewer of them than the silicon stuff, but I imagine it's a new technology, so that makes sense.
Yes they are obviously a thing, but when we're talking about CMOS logic circuits required for consumer electronics like smartphones, laptops and desktops, they've been around since 2016 in research papers, and haven't really gone anywhere beyond more research papers.
CMOS logic circuits required for consumer electronics like smartphones, laptops and desktops
Obviously you won't disrupt those massive sprawling supply chains for the most state of the art chips right away for such a new tech. However, the availability of discretes means that there is some appetite for non silicon tech.
The hyperlink directs to "nl.farnell.com/en-NL"...
Are you Dutch too? What a coincidence, haha.
No, I'm an immigrant.
Wait, you're Dutch? We might actually be going to the same uni if you are studying electrical engineering 😳
Bismuth-209 was long thought to have the heaviest stable nucleus of any element, but in 2003, a research team at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay, France, discovered that 209Bi undergoes alpha decay with a half-life of 20.1 exayears (2.01×1019, or 20.1 quintillion years), over 109 times longer than the estimated age of the universe.
Due to its hugely long half-life, for all known medical and industrial applications, bismuth can be treated as stable.
A half life of 2×10^19 years still means 100 events per gram per year, 100 new defects in the chip every year.
Modern CPUs have transistors at least in the tens of millions, the most advanced have billions. A gram of bismuth has ~2*10^21 atoms. Pre-existing impurities would probably be a bigger factor by orders of magnitude.
100 per gram of the bismuth part of the transistors per years. But even decades old transistors have volume measured in nanometers cubed which implies a negligible mass.
Assume the transistors are 10 nm, the volumic mass of bismuth is 9750 kg/m^3 = 9.75 * 10^-6 kg/nm, which means, assuming the bismuth part of the transistor is 10 nm^3 it weigh 9.75 * 10^-6 * 10 kg = 9.75 * 10^-5 kg.
100 event per gram per year is 1000 event per kg per year, which means approximately 1000 * 10^-5 = 10^-2 event per 10^-5 kg per year or 1 event per 100 000 years per transistor. assuming there is a billion transistors in a chip that's 10^9 * 10^-5 = 10^4 event per year in a chip.
A bismuth atom has a radius of approximately 160 picometers = 0.16 nm. To simplify, let's assimilate the atoms to cubes of volume 0.16 nm^3. Then, per our previous assumption, a transistor in our chip has a side 10 / 0.16 = 62.5 atoms long which means it contains 62.5^3 = 244 140.625 atoms of bismuth, let's round it down to 244 140 atoms, which means the billion transistors of the chip contain 10^9 * 244 140 =~ 2.441 * 10^14 atoms of bismuth.
Which means that 1000 atoms decay per year out of ~ 2.441 * 10^14 atoms (1000 / ~ 2.441 * 10^14) * 100 =~ 4.096 * 10^-10 % of the bismuth. At this rate it would take well over 5 * 10^9 years, or 5 billion years, for half a percent of the material to have decayed.
TL;DR: AstroStelar [he/him] is right, for all intent and purposes bismuth is stable.
I'm not a material scientist but I'm not sure every single atomic decay will result in defect
Every decay will result in at least one crystal defect. Alpha particles don't travel very far, so it probably cause another crystal defect nearby, and maybe a short chain reaction. I'm sure they can work around it but I don't think it will be easier to deal with than the defects due to ion migration they already have to deal with in Silicon.
Used in stomach medicine.
Bismuth is already used in all kinds of consumer products, and using it in chips would probably be one of the safer uses https://healthyfocus.org/bismuth-potential-dangers/
using bismuth oxyselenide (Bi₂O₂Se) for the channel, and bismuth selenite oxide (Bi₂SeO₅) as the gate material.
According to the team, their transistor can run 40% faster than today’s most advanced 3-nanometer silicon chips — and it does so while using 10% less energy.
So a viable alternative.
Oh neat, the transistors are made of bismuth. China produces 80% of the world's supply and has an export ban on bismuth. Neat.
"But turning laboratory breakthroughs into commercial chips typically takes years — sometimes decades"
2 years ago: China is 10 years behind on semiconductor technology!!!
1 year ago: China is 2 years behind on semiconductor technology!!!
6 months ago: China is 1 year behind on semiconductor technology!!!
Now: China's new transistor invention will take 10 years to commercialize!!!
While still a valid callout, these "new chips made out of non-silicon are BETTER in EVERY WAY!" experiments happen about once every 6 months. As it turns out, 10% less energy use isn't compelling enough to convince a trillion dollar industry to completely retool from the ground up, and even without the profit motive that's unlikely to change much.
I'm no expert, but if it works I can definitely see a use for 40% faster speeds in things like AI server farms and military applications. It's not like they need to roll it out to every phone and dishwasher in the world.
Speak for yourself, my dishwasher can only play Doom 2016. No rest until it can crush Eternal at 144hz high graphics
To be fair, it says in the article that this new transistor architecture can be fabricated with existing industrial platforms, so it doesn't seem like it would require a whole lot of retooling.
also the game theory logic of
As it turns out, 10% less energy use isn't compelling enough to convince a trillion dollar industry to completely retool from the ground up, and even without the profit motive that's unlikely to change much.
is likely to play out differently outside of a US-style declining capitalist economy combined with China's current situation.
is likely to play out differently outside of a US-style declining capitalist economy combined with China's current situation.
I don’t think jaomarromis is saying the profit motive is the biggest factor in making the logistics complicated.
I recently decided to apply for electrical engineering lol
make sure to study mandarin
welcome to the club :)
A fellow student of the dark arts!
I had studied "traffic engineering / mobility planning" for 2 years, but I behind, catching up was difficult because of a change in curriculum and I bit off more than I could chew regarding training social skills.
Computer science was too abstract for me and applied physics was too broad, plus I have a lifelong fascination with technology, how things, magnets and electricity. Electrical engineering also seems pretty secure for the job market, given the omnipresence of electricity. I like the physical and the digital and electricity is the medium that connects them! The university I chose also has a lot of international students, I like meeting people from other places.
I've often thought about possibly moving to China and work as an engineer there, given recent developments in Europe and China investing heavily in science right now. I do find it scary to just start a new life in another country like that, I do feel pretty attached to the place I grew up in.
I do find it scary to just start a new life in another country like that
You are right to be scared ...
Every time I moved (I moved a lot because of my dad's job) it was a painful mess.
But I can also not imagine staying in the same place for too long. I start feeling bored.
Electrical engineering/electrical technicians is highly in demand, I know from several friends that even the teachers would “massage” bad grades to get more people to actually finish their degree/training.
A shift born of necessity
There’s a geopolitical current flowing beneath this research.
Due to ongoing U.S.-led export restrictions, Chinese firms have been blocked from buying the latest silicon chip-making equipment. The most advanced lithography machines, those that can manufacture 3-nanometer chips, are made by a handful of companies in the West.
By creating a transistor that doesn’t rely on silicon — and which can be fabricated using existing tools in China — Peng’s team may have found a way around those sanctions.
“While this path is born out of necessity due to current sanctions, it also forces researchers to find solutions from fresh perspectives,” Peng said.
It's funny how much this chip bullshit is backfiring. Who knows how long these researchers have been tinkering with this idea (article doesn't say), and then the chip sanctions thrust it forward into high levels of importance. Even if we had researchers coming to similar conclusions here in the US, these researchers in Chian can just "walk down the street" (in effect) and have a chat with the most developed chip foundry in the world and say "let's make this a reality".
And this kind of tech can only go from lab to mass production with state level investment. No company is going to spend hundreds of billions needed to commercialize a new computing substrate when they can just keep squeezing a bit more performance out of silicon.
From the American side I mostly just see a huge emphasis on quantum computing, which is cool, but idk exactly how practical it is at scale, which is how things really affect industry. Like, you can have a quantum computer that is 3000 times more powerful than the next best one, but if you only have one of them and it is privately owned, the expense to run anything on it is going to be astronomical, which will place it outside the use case for most scientific endeavors.
China's been investing in quantum computing quite a bit as well. The thing with quantum computing is that it's only useful for a specific set of problems.