Moore, Manhattan, and Materials Science

The blistering pace of societal development and advancement has set the tone for some key changes in two fundamental aspects of human society – electrification and mobility. With a growing consensus among the general public for moving to more climate-conscious alternatives, helped by government incentives and spearheaded by the scientific community, we are seeing transformative changes in power conversion technologies and a shift towards electric-vehicle-based mobility. While increasing efficiency lies at the heart of all invention, the motivation for achieving it has shifted from a purely scientific endeavor to a real-world requirement.

Power converters are at the heart of the grid. Conventionally, owing to the macroscopic and robust nature of the system, a frantic Moore’s Law scale miniaturizing rush never plagued power devices, allowing instead a focus on materials research – without an irreplaceable CMOS-style architecture centred around Silicon, newer and better materials can be sought for better performance metrics, mainly higher power negotiating capabilities. The real estate of an integrated circuit (IC) is limited, but for power device applications, this is not the case – an EV, for example, is the size of a room. What the focus then switches over to is not scrounging for space, but innovating to achieve better results, better efficiency, and better performance.

An analogy I think of often is this: You are a real estate developer in Manhattan, New York. You have a small plot of land, and you have to cram as many apartments in that space as possible, and quick. Why quickly, you may ask. Well, there’s another developer nearby trying to figure out how to do the same task as yours, and she’s relentless. Whoever finishes the apartment sooner gets a larger chunk of the market. The competition is fierce, and you’re on a clock. This is a typical CMOS developer.

On the flipside, consider you’re a developer of a mansion in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. You have the budget, and although there are a few other people competing, they are not really breathing down your neck. You have a clock, but it measures years. Saudi Arabia has a harsh climate, so you need to build better. The space is not a major issue, but you need to tinker with newer materials and designs to counter the harsher climate and the sun that beats down stronger on your back every passing year. You need to come up with more sustainable, more functional, and more efficient designs. This is a wide bandgap researcher.

Now, clearly, as the New York developer, you can also aim to switch to better materials, but that will mean changing your supply chain, investing time and effort to find newer types of bricks and cement, and making sure you can use all of that in the existing framework. All this while, your competitor might simply invest in scaling down and cramming more apartments with the pre-existing resources she has. You’re taking a huge short-term risk by trying to find better-suited material.

And consider being in the shoes of the Saudi Arabian developer. You can, technically, try to build smaller, more compact housing, but you don’t really need to. So why bother focusing your energies there? Instead, you know for a fact that if you don’t build with better materials, withstanding harsher conditions, then someone else will. And there are no huge economies of scale – people will switch over to the newer building material if it proves to be better. You have to innovate.

While this is not a perfect analogy, this actually is pretty representative of the CMOS industry (the transistors that go in your laptops) and the EV subsystem market (looking at all the sleek, silent cars with green plates).