Silicine will Revolutionize Everything

Graphene has been the wonder material of choice for all futurists for a few years now. That means it is about time a new material popped up on the radar. Well, now one has, and it is called Silicine.

We wrote about Silicine a while back, but at that point the material was still theoretical. Scientists have now managed to create a sheet of the material that is a mere 1 atom thick. That means that it is now finally ready for prime-time.

Silicine is often seen as graphene’s successor because in many ways it behaves like graphene. But it has one crucial advantage that graphene cannot duplicate: silicine is very compatible with existing silicon circuitry. with silicine, we can create circuits that mix and match traditional silicon and new-fangled silicine. That means reduced manufacturing cost, a faster trip to market, and less R&D while maintaining graphene’s compact size, thermal efficiency and computational speed.

The sheet of silicine was made by a research group from Berlin's Technical University in Germany. They accomplished the task by making a silicon vapor and then forcing it to condense on a sheet of silver. Once on the silver, they could test its properties of the silicine to see if they matched what the theoretical models predicted. And it did.

There is still a lot of work to be done before silicine is found in your smartphone or laptop. Not only was the silicine sheet produced in a way that would be hard to scale, we still don’t even know the full electrical behavior of the sheet. According to one expert, the next step will be growing a silicine sheet on an insulating plane so that we can see how it behaves there. Only then can we begin the tasks of designing and building processors and incredibly small circuits.

NewScientist Photo by : Penn State