Pang Xuelin spent nearly an afternoon in the Biomedical Research Center, and put forward many useful modifications based on the parameters of dynamic APT given by Shi Yi, Yang Heping, and Andrew White.

He uses dynamic APT technology almost every day in the Resident Evil world, and knows the performance and parameters of this device inside out, so it is not surprising that he gives all kinds of useful opinions.

Shi Yi, Yang Heping, and Andrew White didn't care either, Pang Xuelin was famous, and he was in constant contact with Pang Xuelin, so they wouldn't be surprised if there was any miracle on this guy.

Of course, for dynamic APT technology, the three of them also have high hopes.

If cryo-EM technology can win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, then the dynamic APT technology, which is more realistic than cryo-EM technology, can undoubtedly also be obtained.

Moreover, Pang Xuelin has already won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry once, and the three of them can just share one Nobel Prize.

Pang Xuelin spent an afternoon at the Biomedical Research Center to learn about the research and development of APT equipment, and the next day, he went to the carbon-based chip R&D center led by Xu Xingguo.

At present, the development of global semiconductor materials is close to the physical limit, and TSMC, the strongest in the field of integrated circuit foundry, has completed the commercial mass production of the 3nm process, and the 2nm process is also close to the completion of research and development.

SMIC, China's strongest semiconductor manufacturer, is still stuck in the 7nm process, and there is still a two-generation gap with TSMC.

During the previous Sino-US trade war, the United States launched a comprehensive technology blockade against Huawei, claiming that any company that uses American technology is not allowed to cooperate with Huawei.

It was not until the advent of lithium-air batteries that China lifted the technological blockade of Western countries by virtue of the huge advantages of lithium-air batteries, and the crisis faced by Huawei was also solved.

But even so, in the field of high-end manufacturing of integrated circuits, there is still a big gap between China and Western countries.

Among other things, ASML's extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machine alone brings together the best manufacturing technology of all Western countries, and can be called the most sophisticated industrial product ever produced by mankind.

Together with aero engines, it has become a jewel in the crown of industrial manufacturing.

In the era of silicon-based integrated circuits, Western countries have a huge first-mover advantage, and it is difficult for China to compete with Western countries in this field.

At this point, even Pang Xuelin can't do anything.

Let him make a breakthrough in theory, let him quickly improve the level of domestic industrial manufacturing, Pang Xuelin is also at a loss.

The gap in the manufacturing process of silicon-based chips makes it difficult for China to catch up with the developed countries of the West in a short period of time.

But the fact that there is no way to overtake in a corner in the silicon-based field does not mean that there is no other way.

Carbon nanotubes have been given high hopes by scientists.

This is closely related to its own characteristics.

First of all, although the carbon nanotube chip is small, it has stronger energy saving and efficiency efficiency.

Carbon nanotubes are carbon materials made from a single layer of carbon atoms rolled into a tube, which has excellent electrical conductivity and is rich in carbon reserves on the earth.

The diameter of carbon nanotubes can be made according to different processes, a few nanometers to tens of nanometers long; The thickness of the tube wall is smaller, and according to the number of carbon atoms in the wall layer, carbon nanotubes can be divided into single-walled carbon nanotubes and multi-walled carbon nanotubes; With the same level of integration, carbon nanotube chips are smaller than silicon components.

At the same time, carbon nanotubes have extremely high toughness, can withstand bending, tensile and other stresses, and have a very short delay in the electrical signal transmission process, so from the perspective of material physical properties, carbon nanotubes have the potential to replace silicon chips.

Secondly, carbon materials have a variety of allotropes, in addition to carbon nanotubes, there are also well-known diamonds, graphite, fullerenes, activated carbon, and so on.

Its conductive properties are strongly dependent on the structure, and can be transformed from an insulator to a semiconductor and from a semiconductor to a conductor.

Moreover, it conducts electricity in a different way and principle than traditional transistors, and has a stronger conduction ability.

In addition, existing transistors inevitably generate leakage currents during the conduction process, which can lead to heat generation, while carbon nanotubes can avoid this problem and are therefore relatively efficient.

Theoretically, the energy efficiency of carbon nanotube chips is expected to exceed the energy efficiency ratio of existing chips (60% to 70%).

The solution of the heating problem also reduces the pressure on the heat dissipation of the chip.

The power consumption of silicon transistor is very large, in a small chip space, the heating is extremely serious, in order not to overheat the chip and cannot work, it is also necessary to allocate part of the power consumption for the heat dissipation of the chip, which makes the power consumption of the silicon transistor increase.

The carbon nanotube chip itself produces less heat, and the thermal conductivity of the carbon nanotube itself is very high, which effectively reduces the energy consumption for heat dissipation, so the energy efficiency of carbon nanotubes will be much higher than that of transistors made of silicon materials.

In the world, IBM was the first to realize the preparation of carbon nanotube devices, which successfully fabricated a carbon nanotube 20nm gate length device in 2014, but the performance of the device was much worse than expected.

In recent years, there are also various foreign laboratories claiming to have prepared carbon nanotube devices with a gate length of 1nm, but more of them are just gimmicks, and the actual performance is very poor.

In China's research on carbon nanotube devices, after Pang Xuelin completed the mass production and preparation of ultra-high purity electronic-grade carbon nanotubes, the team led by Xu Xingguo began to conduct in-depth research on the doped-free preparation of high-performance carbon nanotubes (CMOS complementary metal oxide semiconductors) transistors and the polarity control of transistors, and has accumulated a lot of technology.

Among them, the carbon nanotube top-gate CMOS field-effect transistor (corresponding to the 5nm technology node) with a gate length of 10 nm prepared by the team has successfully overcome the related problems related to device structure and fabrication process.

Not only that, the performance of the carbon nanotube devices prepared by it is also far superior to that of the carbon nanotube devices that have been reported internationally.

For carbon transistors prepared with conventional structures, when the gate length is less than 5 nm, it will be obviously affected by the short channel effect and tunneling leakage current, and it is difficult to effectively solve the leakage problem by fusing high-k gate dielectric films in the past, so that the device cannot be effectively shut down.

Xu Xingguo's team switched to graphene instead of metal as the source-drain contact of carbon transistors, which effectively suppressed the short-channel effect and direct source-leak tunneling.

Moreover, since only about one electron is involved in the switching conversion of carbon tube devices with a gate length of 5 nm, the gate delay (42 femtoseconds) is close to the physical limit of binary electronic switching devices (40 femtoseconds, determined by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Shannon-von Neumann-Langdal law).

This is the first time that China has mastered the world's most advanced transistor technology, and the overall technology is extremely mature, with the cost of carbon nanotubes falling and the process yield rate improving, this technology is expected to become the most advanced chip manufacturing technology.

The mastery of this new technology is equivalent to the advantage of more than six generations of the existing most advanced silicon-based technology (20 years ahead), so that the advantages of international chip giants will no longer exist, and the domestic semiconductor manufacturing industry will achieve corner overtaking in the near future.

In fact, Pang Xuelin met engineers from Huawei and SMIC in Xu Xingguo's laboratory.

According to Xu Xingguo, the first-generation carbon-based chips will be mass-produced in the next year, and will first be applied to Huawei's 5G base station products.

As for carbon-based chips on the consumer side, it is estimated that it will take another two years before they can be applied on a large scale in mobile phones, PCs and other fields.