This was the best news Lu Zhou had heard over the past few days.
Without hesitating, he immediately told Yang Xu to bring him to the Institute of Computational Materials, where the carbon-based chip team was located.
When the two arrived at the laboratory, the laboratory was dead silent.
A group of researchers surrounded a piece of large experimental equipment, and one of the researchers seemed to be carefully adjusting something.
Lu Zhou and Yang Xu didn’t interrupt them. They quietly waited at the doorstep.
Soon after, the crowd gasped.
Lu Zhou looked at the excited expressions on the researchers’ faces, and he immediately knew what was going on.
Yang Xu started to get impatient, and he looked over at Lu Zhou and said, “Let’s go over there.”
Lu Zhou nodded.
“Yeah.”
The two walked through the laboratory and approached the main experimental equipment. The group of researchers finally noticed Lu Zhou and Yang Xu.
A nerdy looking middle-aged man looked at the two with a surprised look on his face.
“Director Yang? Dean Lu?”
“This is the person in charge of the project,” Yang Xu said, “Professor Wu Tianqun.”
“Nice to meet you, Professor Wu.”
“Hello hello.” Professor Wu shook Lu Zhou’s hand and enthusiastically said, “Academician Lu, what brings you here?”
“I heard there are some new experiment results, so Yang Xu brought me here.” Lu Zhou looked at the equipment and smiled as he said, “Is it finished?”
Professor Wu stood up straight and replied, “This is the second experiment, the first experiment was successfully conducted yesterday!”
Lu Zhou immediately asked, “Can you demonstrate it to me?”
Professor Wu immediately made an inviting gesture.
“Come with me!”
Computer chip production was an extremely complicated process. Layering silicon wafers with photomasks, stacking them like Legos… All these processes required a high level of precision.
This sounded simple, but these “Legos” were measured in nanometers. Not to mention the complex IC designs and photolithography processes. Producing a chip that met market expectations was one of the standards for measuring a country’s electronics technology output.
This was a huge technical feat.
In CMOS production, the feature size was typically represented as the width of the “logic gate”, which was also the channel length of the MOS device. Generally speaking, the smaller the channel length, the better the chip performance and the lower the power consumption.
However, this size couldn’t be reduced forever.
First of all, silicon atoms had its own width, not to mention the quantum tunneling effects would become larger at smaller scales. This combined with various other factors severely limited silicon-based chip advancements.
However, humans’ pursuit of new technology was endless.
Since silicon-based chips couldn’t be further improved, other materials began coming into play.
According to the latest research, the use of carbon nanotubes and molybdenum disulfide and other materials had opened a new way for computer chip performance to improve. This allowed Moore’s law to live on.
But things often didn’t go according to plan.
Even though these two types of materials had the potential to replace silicon-based chips, they had their own respective shortcomings. Research institutes around the world were unable to break through some of the critical bottlenecks.
Which was, to use the groundbreaking materials to create transistors!
Back when Lu Zhou was researching graphene superconducting materials, he discovered that two sheets of single-layered graphene overlapped at a special angle displayed Mott insulator characteristics.
Not only did this major discovery lead to the breakthrough of carbon-based superconducting materials, but it also laid the foundation for the success of the Pangu fusion reactor.
Not just that, but Lu Zhou was also aware that this feature could be applied to the semiconductor world.
Of course, he wasn’t a semiconductor expert. This was just his academic intuition.
Back then, he planned on partnering with Baosheng Group and investing in the project together. Unfortunately, General Manager Sun wasn’t particularly optimistic about the project, so they did not participate.
However, Lu Zhou didn’t care. He had plenty of money and human resources. After returning to China, he assembled a research and development team, pulling talents from the Institute of Computational Materials.
It had been nearly three years since the project was established, and they were finally able to see their project come to life.
Lu Zhou stood next to the experimental equipment and looked at the carbon-based chip transistor through a microscope. He couldn’t help but exclaim, “Beautiful…”
The raw material was graphite, which was peeled into graphene layers. The transistor was like a finely crafted diamond, shining through the microscope.
Yang Xu couldn’t wait any longer, and he quickly stepped up to the microscope and spoke.
“Let me see.”
Lu Zhou smiled and stepped aside, giving the microscope to Yang Xu.
After looking into the microscope for a couple of seconds, Yang Xu spoke emotionally.
“This is better than diamonds… This is worth more than every single diamond in the world combined.”
Lu Zhou laughed.
“That’s a bit exaggerated… But I agree, it is better than diamonds.”
They could trade the carbon-based transistor for an entire truckload of diamonds.
After all…
This small carbon-based transistor was the future…
Lu Zhou looked at the researchers standing behind him. He cleared his throat and said, “This is a huge breakthrough in carbon-based chip technology! Even though the transistor size is still a magnitude larger than the current silicon transistors on the market, carbon-based chips have almost unlimited potential!”
Lu Zhou couldn’t even describe the potential of carbon-based chips.
The only thing he was sure, was that this would increase chip process technology by an entire order of magnitude!
It wasn’t an exaggeration to say that this alone could make Professor Wu an academician!
“Good job everyone!”
Lu Zhou looked at the group of excited researchers and Professor Wu Tianqun. He paused for a moment and added solemnly, “Today, we made history!”
