In a world powered by computers, where practically everything can be digitized, credits should be given to silicon.
The element is known for being the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust by mass, coming after oxygen.
It was not until the early 19th century, that researchers were able to prepare silicon in its pure form, in which the element comes as a hard but brittle crystalline solid with a blue-grey metallic luster.
Among its other uses, silicon is probably the most famous semiconductor.
What this means, the material has an electrical conductivity value falling between that of a proper conductor, like metallic copper, and an proper insulator, like glass.
It was only since the late 20th century to the early 21st century, that Silicon becomes essential to the modern world economy.
This is why the era is often described as the Digital Age, or the Information Age, or the Silicon Age.
This happens because silicon is essential to the creations of transistors and integrated circuit chips used in most modern technology, such as smartphones and other computers.
While there are plenty of other semiconductors, which include carbon and germanium, as well as tin, lead, and flerovium, silicon remains the most desirable semiconductor, simply because of its abundance.
With plenty where that came from, the production of silicon is fairly inexpensive, if compared to others.
But this time, there is another kid on the block.
The material is cubic boron arsenide (c-BAs).
The material may not come cheap, but it packs lots of advantages over silicon.
According to researchers, the material could be a "game-changing" semiconductor with a "very high mobility for both electrons and holes," according to an MIT article.
This is because c-BAs could bring lots of benefits over silicon, including better thermals, conductivity, and a performance increase worthy of the future of computing.
Despite chips have become increasingly small, keeping temperature at optimum range is difficult. This is made worse with hardware that become increasingly powerful with each passing year.
One of the major way to overcome these problems, is by replacing silicon as the main material used in manufacturing semiconductors.
Silicon is widely used and cheap to make. But to open the possibilities of more powerful computers of the future, silicon is not the perfect solution.
MIT researchers think that c-BAs can be a great candidate to replace silicon.
According to the paper's lead author, Shin:
MIT also explained that electrons can pass through silicon very easily, but it’s nowhere near as efficient for "holes" - a term used to refer the positively charged counterparts of electrons. Silicon only does a good job dealing with negatively charged electrons.
Silicon is also poor when it comes to heat conductivity.
On the other hand, c-BAs is good at these things.
In fact, BAs have thermal conductivity that is remarkably high, which is comparable to that of diamond and graphite.
"That’s important because of course in semiconductors we have both positive and negative charges equivalently. So, if you build a device, you want to have a material where both electrons and holes travel with less resistance," said Gang Chen, the leading professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.
In short, c-BAs has a high ambipolar mobility. An article by the MIT even considered it the "best semiconductor" of them all.
The biggest downside of c-BAs, is its availability.
Before cubic boron arsenide can ever be harnessed in a large enough capacity to replace silicon, the material may never be able to replace silicon once and for all.
Previously, materials considered a possible alternative for silicon, also include gallium nitride (GaN).
