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China Just Made the World's Fastest Transistor and It Is Not Made of Silicon
(www.zmescience.com)
this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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Not viable because bismuth is radioactive. We're not moving away from silicon anytime soon, I mean we've heard of the hype stories about gallium nitride and carbon nanotube transistors every few months now for nearly a decade, yet almost everything still uses silicon.
A half life of 2×10^19 years still means 100 events per gram per year, 100 new defects in the chip every year.
Modern CPUs have transistors at least in the tens of millions, the most advanced have billions. A gram of bismuth has ~2*10^21 atoms. Pre-existing impurities would probably be a bigger factor by orders of magnitude.