GaN and Other Extreme Materials

As we approach the ultimate limits for transistor scaling, exciting new opportunities arise to redefine electronics. This talk will describe some of these opportunities, such as how the direct wide bandgap of new semiconductor materials like Gallium Nitride (GaN) enables to significantly improve the performance of power electronics, wireless communications and, even, digital computers. At the same time, atomically-thin materials like graphene and molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) are destined to change the form-factor of electronics. This will create a new generation of electronic systems the size of a biological cell, or distributed sensing that covers entire countries. In summary, although electronics has gone a long way in the last 60 years, we are just starting to scratch the surface of its full potential. The intersection of some of these extreme materials with silicon creates unprecedented opportunities for increasing, by orders of magnitude, the impact and reach of electronics in the 21st Century.