Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Why is Silicon Used for Computer Chips?”.
Silicon Valley that part of California, where CPUs are designed startups flourish and no one can afford to buy a house. But did you ever stop to think about why it’s called Silicon Valley? Why exactly does Silicon seem to be so universally used for electronics instead of some other material like copper, graphite or potato? Well, silicon has a number of properties that make it unusual among chemical elements right now, scientists know 118 elements and of those only six are commonly classified as metalloids silicon being one of them. These metalloids exhibit metal-like characteristics but aren’t true metals. Usually, they have a silvery shiny, look like true metals, but instead of being malleable, they’re, often quite brittle, meaning they can break apart easily, and although they can conduct electricity like metals, they aren’t quite as good at it, which is where the word semiconductor comes from. This semi conductivity is especially important because, while obviously computers and other things that use microchips need electricity to run their whole principle of operation relies on being able to let electricity pass through certain transistors selectively, which you can learn more about in this article. A normal metallic conductor would let electrons through too easily meaning way too many transistors would light up at once, and your CPU wouldn’t be able to process instructions correctly, which is okay. If you want your computer to serve as a very expensive paperweight or a cheap one, I guess as it were, which is all fine and good, then Linus, but you still haven’t answered the question why silicon specifically, instead of some other semiconductor like germanium? Well, although Silicon Valley might be an expensive place to live, actual silicon is quite cheap and it’s also pretty easy to find in the Earth’s crust. In fact, silicon is one of the most common elements in the universe, so it’s fully possible that spacefaring nations in some distant galaxies are using silicon CPUs to play plants vs. humans or whatever.
Silicon also has other benefits such as being able to operate well at a wide temperature range stock. Coolers am i right and it can be easily doped with other chemicals that are necessary for micro processors to work. For example, it’s quite easy to form an insulating layer of silicon dioxide. Just by sticking silicon into a hot furnace.
The tiny transistors in a cpu need insulated areas to further control and direct the flow of electricity with precision. So silicon’s versatility makes it a natural choice, but even though silicon has proven to be extremely useful, it is not perfect. Although it’s cheap and abundant, there is a trade-off with how quickly it can conduct electricity. Other semiconducting materials can move the electrons around faster, meaning that they could be used to make higher performance processors, albeit at a higher cost, and another limitation of silicon will mean that it will not be the universal material in our processors for too much longer.
Transistors. Keep being made smaller and smaller and smaller in order to make our chips more powerful and more power efficient, but we’re getting to the point where silicon can’t be made into transistors much smaller than what we have already due to its chemical properties. In fact, intel has already announced that for its seven nanometer chips that could be released around 2020, it will be using something other than silicon. To put that in context, 7 nanometers is only about 35 atoms wide pugh, so there you have it while smaller transistors and faster CPUs may require more exotic materials.
There’S no doubt that the path to this future of tomorrow was paved with silicon. I mean quite literally really, if you think about it, they used to use it in like pottery and bricks. They still do use it in bricks. If you count like minecraft speaking of bricks, let’s say you work as like a freelance bricklayer or you do on the side, computer work or you run a small dance studio out of your garage whatever it is that you do as a freelancer or small business owner. It shouldn’t be wasting time with complicated accounting software, and that is where fresh books comes in fresh books is designed to save you time and help. You use the time that you save to make more money or have more of a life and they’ve got a whole new platform.
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