On a recent episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, Professor Eric Pop pulled back the curtain on the invisible materials powering our digital lives. And he revealed a surprising truth: the silicon and copper that have reigned supreme for the past 60 years may be reaching their limits.
Pop, who leads a research group exploring next-generation electronic materials, explained that the real driver of faster electronics has been miniaturization, not material changes. But as features shrink below 10 nanometers (that’s just a few dozen atoms), silicon and copper start to misbehave.
“If you make the copper wiring less than about 10 nanometers across, electrons will begin to bump into the edges of the wire,” Pop said. “So you’re essentially bringing the edges very, very close in to where electrons like to conduct current. And those walls are not atomically smooth.”
The result is a lot of electron scattering – and a major roadblock to continued scaling. So what’s the solution? Enter the world of two-dimensional (2D) materials.
Unlike silicon, which is a rigid, three-dimensional lattice, 2D semiconductors like molybdenum disulfide are just a few atoms thick. These materials maintain their electronic properties even when scaled down to the nanoscale, opening up new possibilities for ultra-dense, low-power devices.
There’s hope now that at least for sub tens of nanometers, there may be a class of other materials which could carry electricity a little bit better. Fundamentally, it’s about the surfaces carrying electricity better than copper surfaces, and these wires being kind of dominated by the surfaces.
But discovering new wonder materials is only half the battle. To truly revolutionize electronics, researchers need to figure out how to manufacture these exotic nanomaterials at scale. And that’s where artificial intelligence comes in.
Pop envisions a future where AI won’t just predict promising new materials but will also suggest how to make them. By coupling machine learning with deep expertise in materials synthesis, he believes we can rapidly accelerate the pace of discovery and deployment.
The potential applications are vast, from ultra-efficient smartphones to lightweight, long-range electric vehicles. But Pop cautions that we’re still in the early innings of this materials revolution.
For now, his lab at Stanford is focused on laying the scientific groundwork – characterizing new 2D semiconductors, exploring novel device architectures, and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible at the nanoscale.
It’s a thrilling time to be a materials scientist and an even more exciting to be an electronics consumer. So the next time you marvel at the power of your pocket supercomputer, spare a thought for the unsung materials making it all possible – and for the researchers like Eric Pop working to write the next chapter in their story.
To learn more about The Future of Everything podcast from Stanford Engineering, visit futureofeverything.stanford.edu.
