The carbon-based chip has been completed!
This was probably the best news Lu Zhou had heard in the past few days.
After being surprised for a while, he immediately asked Yang Xu to take him to the Institute of Computational Materials. They found the carbon-based chip project laboratory.
When the two arrived at the laboratory, the laboratory was quite quiet.
A group of researchers were gathered around a piece of experimental equipment that was about the height of two people. One of the researchers was carefully debugging something.
Lu Zhou didn't disturb them. Instead, he and Yang Xu waited at the door for a while.
Soon after, gasps of surprise began to spread through the crowd.
Lu Zhou looked at the excited faces of the researchers. He knew that they must have discovered something incredible.
Yang Xu looked at Lu Zhou and said, "Let's go."
"Let's go."
Lu Zhou nodded.
"Yeah."
They walked around a bunch of experimental equipment and walked into the laboratory. When the two were about to get close to the experimental equipment, the group of researchers finally saw Lu Zhou and Yang Xu.
A middle-aged academical-looking man was standing in the crowd. He had a surprised look on his face as he quickly walked up.
"Director Yang? Dean Lu? "
"This is the person in charge of the project." Yang Xu knew that this was the first time Lu Zhou had met him, so he said, "This is Professor Wu Tianqun."
"Hello, Professor Wu."
"Hello, hello." Professor Wu shook Lu Zhou's hand and said, "Academician Lu, why are you here?"
"I heard that the experiment had results, so Yang Xu brought me here." Lu Zhou let go of Professor Wu's hand and looked at the equipment in the crowd. He smiled and asked, "Is it done?"
Professor Wu straightened his back and spoke with a red face.
"This is a repeat experiment. The first experiment was successful yesterday!"
Lu Zhou immediately said, "Can you show me?"
Professor Wu immediately made an inviting gesture.
"Please follow me!"
Producing a chip was a rather complicated process. Using a silicon wafer as a substrate, layers of light shields were stacked on top of each other like a pile of Legos. Only then would a complete chip be produced.
This sounded easy, but considering that these "toys" were all nanometers in size, as well as the complicated IC design and photolithography process, the ability to produce a chip that met the market's expectations had become an important indicator of a country's electronics industry.
Let's not talk about what this means for a country or a company. Let's discuss this problem from a technical point of view.
In CMOS technology, the characteristic size was typically represented by the width of the "gate", which was the channel length of the MOS device. Generally speaking, the smaller the feature size, the higher the integration of the chip, the better the performance, and the lower the power consumption.
However, this size could not be reduced indefinitely.
First of all, silicon atoms had their own width, and the tunneling effect in quantum mechanics became more and more important as the line width continued to shrink. Under the combined effects of various factors, the future of silicon-based chips was severely limited.
However, mankind's pursuit of new technology was eternal.
Since silicon-based chips couldn't be used, then they could open up new battlefields using other materials that might work.
According to the latest research, the use of materials such as carbon nanotubes and molybdenum disulfide had opened up a new path for chip manufacturing, allowing people to see the light of Moore's Law.
However, the situation wasn't always so optimistic.
Although these two materials had the potential to replace silicon-based chips, because of their respective defects, the research institutes around the world that were researching silicon-based chip replacement materials were unable to break through the most critical bottleneck.
Which was to use these two groundbreaking materials to successfully produce the core component of the chip — the transistor!
When Lu Zhou was researching graphene superconducting materials, he discovered that two monolayers of graphene overlapped at a special angle would exhibit the characteristics of a Mott insulator under special circumstances.
This major discovery not only directly led to the explosive breakthrough of carbon-based superconducting materials, but it also laid the foundation for the success of the Pangu controllable fusion reactor.
Not just that, but Lu Zhou was keenly aware that this characteristic could not only be used in the field of superconductivity, but it could also play an unexpected role in the field of semiconductors.
Of course, he didn't know much about the semiconductor industry. He only made this judgment based on his academic intuition.
At the time, he originally planned on asking his partner, Baosheng Group's Manager Sun, to invest in this project together. Unfortunately, Manager Sun felt that this project wasn't very reliable. As the manager of a subsidiary of China Airlines, he didn't have that much decision-making power, so he rejected the project.
However, Lu Zhou didn't care. He didn't lack money, he didn't lack people, and he didn't care about losses. After he returned to China, he pulled out his own research and development team, put it under the banner of the Institute of Computational Materials, and started this project himself.
It had been two or three years since the project was established, and he finally saw the light of dawn.
Lu Zhou stood next to the experimental equipment and looked through a microscope at the transistor completed by the carbon-based chip project team. After a long time, he couldn't help but sigh.
"Beautiful …"
Even though the raw material was pitch-black graphite, after being stripped into graphene fragments and stacked into a transistor, it looked like a finely crafted diamond. It exuded a bright luster under the microscope.
Yang Xu, who was standing next to Lu Zhou, couldn't help but step forward when he saw Lu Zhou looking away from the eyepiece.
"Let me take a look too."
Lu Zhou smiled and stepped aside, giving the eyepiece to Yang Xu.
He looked at the eyepiece for a while. After about two minutes, he sighed.
"Calling it a diamond is too cheap … I dare say that all the diamonds in the world added up together are not as valuable as this thing."
Lu Zhou laughed.
"That's ridiculous … But I agree with you, calling it a diamond is a bit cheap."
If he put this thing up for auction, even if the price was enough to buy a car full of diamonds, a large group of people would still be willing to pay for it.
After all …
Inside this tiny carbon-based transistor, there was a future full of imagination …
Lu Zhou looked at the researchers standing behind him and cleared his throat.
"As long as we can make carbon-based transistors, we will have broken through the most critical bottleneck of carbon-based chip technology! Although the size of our carbon-based transistor is an order of magnitude smaller than the common silicon-based transistors on the market, a chip made of carbon-based transistors has a theoretical minimum manufacturing process that is unimaginable for silicon-based chips! "
Lu Zhou couldn't describe how unimaginable this was.
The only thing he was sure of was that this great research had expanded the lower limit of chip technology by an order of magnitude!
It was not an exaggeration to say that if Professor Wu wanted to become an academician, with this research, Lu Zhou would be able to push him into the next academician election.
Even if he didn't succeed, he would definitely succeed next year!
"You guys did an excellent job!"
Lu Zhou looked at the group of excited researchers and Professor Wu Tianqun. He paused for a second and spoke in a solemn tone.
"Today, right now, we have created history and redefined the future!"
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