Smaller and Smaller Chips

For years now, many people have thought that we had reached the limit of Moore’s Law – the idea that the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years. But that number has continued to increase steadily to the point where some chips now contain 50 billion transistors…and still counting…with the smallest components about the size of a red blood cell.

The problem is that, when things get that small and close together, electrons more easily leak from one component to another, causing interference. So a group of researchers has developed a way to insulate them using what’s called thin-film amorphous boron-nitride (also known as white graphene).

Like carbon, boron and nitrogen can crystallize into a single layer of atoms. But unlike graphene, boron-nitride has properties that make it an excellent insulator as well as thermally stable. It can be fabricated using chemical vapor deposition with no need for manufacturing retooling. And at a thickness of only three nanometers, it could definitely pave the way for yet another generation of smaller and smaller chips.