Silicon Valley that part of California
where CPUs are designed startups flourish and no one can afford to buy a
house but did you ever stop to think about why it's called Silicon Valley why
exactly does Silicon seem to be so universally used for electronics instead
of some other material like copper graphite or potato well silic has a
number of properties that make it unusual among chemical elements right
now s ssts know of 118 elements and of
those only six are commonly classified
as metalloids silicon being one of them these metalloids exhibit metallik
characteristics but aren't true metals
usually they have a silvery shiny look like true Metals but instead of being
malleable they're often quite brittle meaning they can break apart easily and
although they can conduct electricity like metals they aren't quite as good at
it which is where the word semiconductor comes from this semiconductivity is
especially important because while obviously computers and other things
that use microchips need electricity to run their whole principle of operation
relies on being able to let electricity pass through certain transistors
selectively which you can learn more about in this video a normal metallic
conductor would let electrons through too easily meaning way too many
transistors would light up at once and your CPU wouldn't be able to process
instructions correctly which is okay if
you want your computer to serve as a very expensive paper weight or a cheap
one I guess as it were which is all fine and good then lonus but you still
haven't answered the question why silicon specifically instead of some
other semiconductor like geranium well
although Silicon Valley might be an expensive place to live actual silicon
is quite cheap and it's also pretty easy to find in the Earth's crust in fact
silicon is one of the most common elements in the universe so it's fully
possible that space fairing civilizations in some distant Galaxy are
using silicon CPUs to play Plants versus
humans or whatever silicon also has other benefits such as being able to
operate well at a wide temperature range stock coolers am I right and it can be
easily doped with other chemicals that are necessary for microprocessors to
work for example it's quite easy to form an insulating layer of silicon dioxide
just by sticking silicon into a hot furnace the tiny transistors in a CPU
need insulated areas to further control and direct the flow of electricity with
Precision so silicon's versatility makes it a natural choice but even though
silicon has proven to be extremely useful it is not perfect although it's
cheap and abundant there is a tradeoff with how quickly it can conduct
electricity other semiconducting materials can move the electrons around
faster meaning that they could be used to make higher performance processors
albeit at a higher cost and another limitation of silicon will mean that it
will not be the universal material in our processors for too much longer
transistors keep being made smaller and smaller and smaller in order to make our
chips more powerful and more power efficient but we're getting to the point
where silicon can't be made into transistors much smaller than what we
have already due to its chemical properties in fact Intel has already
announced that for its 7 nanometer chips
that could be released around 2020 it will be using something other than
silicon to put that in context 7 nanometers is only about 35 atoms wide
so there you have it while smaller transistors and faster CPUs may require
more EX materials there's no doubt that
the path to this future of tomorrow was paved with
silicon I mean quite literally really if you think about it they used to use it
in like Pottery in bricks they still do use it in bricks if you count like
Minecraft speaking of bricks let's say
you work as like a freelance brick layer
or you do on the side computer work or you run a small dance studio out of your
garage whatever it is that you do as a freelancer or small business buiness
owner it shouldn't be wasting time with
complicated accounting software and that is where freshbooks comes in freshbooks
is designed to save you time and help you use the time that you save to make
more money or have more of a life and they've got a whole new platform that's
been redesigned for the way you work to be simpler and easier than ever before
not to mention helping you get paid more quickly you can create and send
professional looking invoices less than 30 seconds you can set up online
payments with just a couple of clicks and get paid up to 4 days faster and you
can even see when your client has seen your invoice and put an end to the oh
did you send that to me ohg I guess I'll check with dill from accounting and see
if we could pay that eventually no no wrong so fresh books is offering a
30-day unrestricted free trial to our viewers and declaim it all you have to
do is head to freshbooks.com tequi and enter Techquickie in the how did you
hear about us section so thanks for watching guys if you like this video
like it if you disliked it dislike it if you want to check out other channels we'll have a featured video right about
there and you can leave a comment with video suggestions down there and you can subscribe and follow wherever in all the
ways