In the past half century, the development of human beings has largely depended on the progress of semiconductor technology, or the past half century or more is the era when Moore's Law comes into play, on the one hand, Moore's Law reflects the progress of information technology, and on the other hand, it can be regarded as the improvement of human energy efficiency. With the same amount of energy, humans can allow computers to process and store more information.
However, as the density of semiconductor integrated circuits increases, so does the energy density inside them. The power consumption per unit volume of today's semiconductor chips has exceeded the power per unit volume of nuclear reactors, and at the same time, most of the energy consumed by integrated circuits is wasted on controlling heat generation and is not used for calculation.
At the same time, more energy is required to cool down the mainframe computers. Today, energy consumption has become a bottleneck in the development of information technology, and every one of us who uses mobile phones has experienced this.
To solve this problem, it is impossible to continue with today's technology, and revolutionary new technologies are needed. Among the many new technologies in the future, they can be divided into two categories: open source and cost reduction. Open source technologies include the use of higher energy-density power supply devices, such as nano-cells with very close electrodes, and topological insulators with little energy use in terms of throttling, which have the potential to replace silicon as the new carrier of information technology in the future.
This surface is characterized by superconductivity, while the interior is a new material of insulator, based on the principle of the quantum hall effect in physics. The quantum Hall effect, which is the quantum mechanical version of the Hall effect, can only be observed under the extreme conditions of low temperature and strong magnetic field, when the Hall resistance is no longer linear with the magnetic field, and a quantum plateau appears. Scholars, including Professor Zhang Shousheng, a renowned physicist at Stanford University, have theoretically demonstrated the existence of topological insulators.
The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three physicists for their work in the field of topological insulators: D**id Thouless, Duncanhaldane and Michael Kosterlitz. Of course, there is still a long way to go to find the direction to make this material and use it in products.