There’s a geopolitical current flowing beneath this research.
Due to ongoing U.S.-led export restrictions, Chinese firms have been blocked from buying the latest silicon chip-making equipment. The most advanced lithography machines, those that can manufacture 3-nanometer chips, are made by a handful of companies in the West.
By creating a transistor that doesn’t rely on silicon — and which can be fabricated using existing tools in China — Peng’s team may have found a way around those sanctions.
“While this path is born out of necessity due to current sanctions, it also forces researchers to find solutions from fresh perspectives,” Peng said.
It’s funny how much this chip bullshit is backfiring. Who knows how long these researchers have been tinkering with this idea (article doesn’t say), and then the chip sanctions thrust it forward into high levels of importance. Even if we had researchers coming to similar conclusions here in the US, these researchers in Chian can just “walk down the street” (in effect) and have a chat with the most developed chip foundry in the world and say “let’s make this a reality”.
And this kind of tech can only go from lab to mass production with state level investment. No company is going to spend hundreds of billions needed to commercialize a new computing substrate when they can just keep squeezing a bit more performance out of silicon.
From the American side I mostly just see a huge emphasis on quantum computing, which is cool, but idk exactly how practical it is at scale, which is how things really affect industry. Like, you can have a quantum computer that is 3000 times more powerful than the next best one, but if you only have one of them and it is privately owned, the expense to run anything on it is going to be astronomical, which will place it outside the use case for most scientific endeavors.
China’s been investing in quantum computing quite a bit as well. The thing with quantum computing is that it’s only useful for a specific set of problems.
It’s funny how much this chip bullshit is backfiring. Who knows how long these researchers have been tinkering with this idea (article doesn’t say), and then the chip sanctions thrust it forward into high levels of importance. Even if we had researchers coming to similar conclusions here in the US, these researchers in Chian can just “walk down the street” (in effect) and have a chat with the most developed chip foundry in the world and say “let’s make this a reality”.
And this kind of tech can only go from lab to mass production with state level investment. No company is going to spend hundreds of billions needed to commercialize a new computing substrate when they can just keep squeezing a bit more performance out of silicon.
From the American side I mostly just see a huge emphasis on quantum computing, which is cool, but idk exactly how practical it is at scale, which is how things really affect industry. Like, you can have a quantum computer that is 3000 times more powerful than the next best one, but if you only have one of them and it is privately owned, the expense to run anything on it is going to be astronomical, which will place it outside the use case for most scientific endeavors.
China’s been investing in quantum computing quite a bit as well. The thing with quantum computing is that it’s only useful for a specific set of problems.