A realistic assessment of the prospect of silicon be replaced by other materials for IC applications

Abstract

Silicon is the most common material used in semi-conductor. It can be used to make single crystal silicon wafer. Though it has the widest usage, silicon has high calorific value. Also, the performance loss is high compared to silicon carbide and the operating temperature is relatively low compared to gallium oxide. Luckily, there are several materials that could possibly replace silicon. The first one is 2D semiconductor. The prospective evaluation of 2D semiconductors is high. But now the biggest problem is the low-resistance connections with them. The second one is gallium nitride. It has high hardness, melting point and stability. This makes it a good material for high temperature, high frequency and high power devices. However, excellent property brings high cost. This disadvantage prevents gallium nitride to be widely used. The last one is graphene. It has strong electrical conductivity, ultra-high strength, excellent electrical properties, and strong electron interaction. It has a higher carrier mobility than silicon. While every coin has two sides, producing graphene on a large scale is difficult and expensive. Besides, graphene is highly reactive with oxygen and heat. What’s more, zero band gap nearly makes it impossible to become a semi-conductor material. Even though there are many methods of opening the bandgap, these methods still bring inevitable drawbacks. All in all, there are still many problems to be solved when new materials replace silicon in integrated circuit applications.