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For decades, researchers have been trying to combine semiconductor materials that have different and potentially complementary characteristics into a single microchip. Now, an MIT team has finally succeeded in this effort, an advance that could point to a way of overcoming fundamental barriers of size and speed facing today's silicon chips.

The standard semiconductor material for most of today's computer chips is silicon, and the main way engineers have improved the speed of silicon chips so far is to keep making them smaller. But silicon chips are now approaching their fundamental size limits, says Tomas Palacios, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. "We won't be able to continue improving silicon by scaling it down for long," he says. "It's very difficult to make them a lot smaller."

Source: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/palacios-chip-091509.html