> One major problem that Re6Se8Cl2 faces is that rhenium is one of the rarest elements on Earth. This makes Re6Se8Cl2 very expensive and unlikely to ever make its way into a commercial product.<p>I call BS. It is rare, true. But it is found in reasonable concentrations in some minerals (alongside molybdenum) that are already being mined and we just need to learn to extract rhenium out of it. For high perf semiconductors you only need microscopic amounts of it anyway.<p>As to costs, majority of the costs are not in substrates anyway, however costly they are. The costs are in IP and in processing. I suspect even if silicon was as expensive as gold it would not meaningfully change the cost of current high-end CPUs that go into our phones.<p>(edited, I mistakenly wrote ruthenium where I meant rhenium)
I remember when people were super excited for graphene and nanotubes in semiconductors. What happened to that? Seems like a lot of things stop dead in its tracks when it comes to mass manufacturing.
"This means processing speeds in devices based on them could reach femtoseconds, a million times as fast as the speeds achievable with current gigahertz electronics"<p>That seems like quite the discovery.
A slightly important sentence, if you're caught up on the "...using Unobtainium" issue:<p>> Although the new material is made using one of the rarest elements on Earth, the researchers suggest counterparts made from more abundant materials may be discovered that operate comparably fast.
Yes, it is expensive if you want millions of chips, but imagine those militar and trading operations who would be willing to pay for that speedup as an edge, hope they manufacture something soon. I just wonder how resusable is stuff like EUV when you change the semiconductor material...
there are lots of ridiculously expensive materials that are economic to make microelectronics<p>you're probably reading this on a device that uses motherfucking hafnia for its dram dielectric<p>i mean admittedly hafnium is still a thousand times as abundant as rhenium
Could this mechanism possibly be related to the Boson Peak anomaly in disordered materials? Potentially extra acoustic excitation mode caused by interactions of transient large-cluster vibrations.
> One major problem that Re6Se8Cl2 faces is that rhenium is one of the rarest elements on Earth. This makes Re6Se8Cl2 very expensive and unlikely to ever make its way into a commercial product.<p>Something doesn't add up.<p>Rhenium price seems to be $2k/kg. Gold price is $62k/kg. Silver price is $0.8k/kg. So Rhenium is about 3 times as expensive as silver and 30 times cheaper than gold.
Any thoughts on how manganese and technetium seem to share similar properties to Rhenium? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhenium" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhenium</a>