The classic strategy of continually shrinking transistors in silicon chips to create faster, more powerful computers is starting to fail us.
“Even though silicon works at these extremely small dimensions, the energy efficiency required to do one calculation has been going up, and this makes it highly unsustainable,” Deep Jariwala, an engineering professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Wall Street Journal in 2022. “Energy-wise it doesn’t make sense anymore.”
We need to solve this sustainability issue if we want to continue improving our tech without causing further damage to the environment, and the hunt for solutions has some researchers taking a closer look at chips made from semiconducting materials other than silicon, including gallium nitride, a compound made of gallium and nitrogen.
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