San Francisco - Physicists at Stanford University have identified a possible replacement for silicon as the basic material in computer chips, they said Tuesday. The chemical compound called bismuth telluride allows electrons to travel at room temperature without resistance, losing no energy, and can be fabricated using existing semiconductor technologies. Such material could provide a leap in microchip speeds, and even become the bedrock of an entirely new kind of computing, physicists Yulin Chen and Zhi-Xun Shen said.
"We are at the very beginning of understanding this new class of materials," said Chen, of the Stanford Institute for Materials & Energy Science. "The next step is to apply what we have learned - to see if it can be fabricated and made functional."
The discovery comes as engineers fear they are reaching the end of their ability to increase the number of components that fit on silicon chips. This miniaturization trend, dubbed Moore's Law after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, roughly doubles computing power every two years.
The new discovery at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre is part of a new field called spintronics, which uses the directional spin of electrons to store information.
"This is already a very exciting thing," said Chen, adding that the material "could let us make a device with new operating principles."
