The U.S. accused a Chinese MIT professor of spying. Now cleared, he helped discover what may be the ‘best semiconductor material ever found’

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Original Article: The U.S. accused a Chinese MIT professor of spying. Now cleared, he helped discover what may be the ‘best semiconductor material ever found’

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A team of researchers has discovered what the Massachusetts Institute of Technology calls the “best semiconductor material ever found,” even better than silicon, the material used in just about every computer chip on earth.

In July, scientists from MIT, the University of Houston, and other institutions announced they had proved that cubic boron arsenide performs better than silicon at conducting heat and electricity, opening up new possibilities for smaller and faster chips. The team includes China-born professor Gang Chen, the former head of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, who was the subject of a yearlong investigation by the Department of Justice before the agency dropped espionage charges because of lack of evidence.

It could be decades before semiconductors based on cubic boron arsenide are used in commercially available chips—if they prove viable at all. But ultimately, the new material may help designers overcome the natural limits of current models to make better, faster, and smaller chips, and its discovery is the kind of research the U.S. risked missing out on with a now-disbanded crackdown on experts like Chen.

Cubic boron arsenide

Despite its ubiquity in the chip industry, silicon is not the best semiconductor out there. For one, it doesn’t conduct heat very well, meaning chips and consumer devices often need to include expensive cooling systems or risk overheating.

According to the July study, cubic boron arsenide conducts heat 10 times better than silicon. “Heat is a major bottleneck for electronics,” Chen said in a press release accompanying the study, calling the new material a potential “game changer.”

The study also revealed that cubic boron arsenide is better than silicon at conducting both electrons and its positively charged counterpart, the “electron hole.” The latter is an especially glaring weakness of silicon, limiting the speed of silicon-based semiconductors.

Chip designers are starting to bump up against the natural limits of silicon in their quest for smaller and faster chips. Researchers are publicly talking about the end of Moore’s Law, the 1975 prediction by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors in a chip would double every two years, which has been a guiding star for the semiconductor industry ever since.

Researchers are exploring ways to squeeze more speed out of new computers through n...