Coal: Don’t Burn It, Compute With It

Silicon semiconductors have dominated the electronics industry for the past 70 years, as they are used to build transistors that are found in nearly all electronic devices. But, driven in part by machine learning’s enormous appetite for compute power, a demand for ever smaller transistors is expanding the range of materials that could serve as substrates for transistors and all the components of modern computer chips. Now a team of researchers have found a way to use coal to create ultrathin insulating films that could help launch a new era of semiconductors made with 2D materials.