They demonstrate a new semiconductor that could be better than all existing ones

Silicon is one of the most abundant chemical elements on Earth, and in its pure form the material has become the basis for much of modern technology, from solar cells to computer chips. But silicon is not perfect.

Although silicon allows electrons to pass through its structure easily, it is much less forgiving of “holes” (the positively charged counterparts of electrons) and taking advantage of both is important for some types of chips. In addition, silicon is not a very good conductor of heat, so when it heats up it is difficult to prevent it from retaining heat and this requires resorting to expensive cooling systems such as those that are common in computers.

Now, a team including, among others, Jungwoo Shin and Gang Chen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, as well as Zhifeng Ren of the University of Houston in the United States, has conducted experiments showing that a material known as cubic boron arsenide suffers from neither of those two limitations. It provides high mobility to both electrons and holes, and has excellent thermal conductivity. It is a material that can yield much more than silicon. The researchers believe that cubic boron arsenide may be the best d semiconductor material found to date, and perhaps the best that the laws of physics allow.

The next step in this line of research and development will be to see if the new material can be manufactured in industrial quantities, easily and cheaply, and used in an equally practical and affordable way in applications.

Boron arsenide crystals. (Image: University of Houston)

Until now, cubic boron arsenide has only been manufactured and tested in small batches on a laboratory scale that are not uniform. The researchers had to use special methods to probe small regions within the material.

Further work will be required to determine whether cubic boron arsenide can replace the ubiquitous silicon. But even in the near future, the material could already find some uses, for special applications in which the advantages it has are decisive to achieve the objective, as the researchers argue.

Shin and his colleagues expose the technical details of their achievement in the academic journal Science, under the title “High ambipolar mobility in cubic boron arsenide.” (Font: NCYT by Amazings)