Simply, silicon is a bulk material. Silicon's semiconducting properties occur thanks to additional dopants added to its crystal lattice structure, and taking advantage of this arrangement requires the usage of a bulk quantity of the material. Getting around this apparent lower limit of silicon needed to produce a semiconductor will require new materials, it seems. "When you get to these scales, you won't be able to turn silicon on and off anymore," Mervin Zhao, lead author of a paper published Monday in Nature Nanotechnology
describing the Berkeley research, told me. "It acts as a bad switch."

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