The World Needs the U.S. and China as Partners in Creativity
U.S. technology protectionism and trade restrictions are forcing China to create its own largely independent chip industry, while being pushed to innovate in graphene, wafer fab, and wafer scale electronics.
These measures are sundering a global “innovation ecosystem” that promised to usher in an astonishing era of global prosperity and human well-being with China and the United States as the leading partners.
All is not lost. A morality tale, and an inspiration for this era comes from the experience of Dutch physicist Walter de Heer, a professor at Georgia Tech and former professor at Tianjin University in China’s Silicon Valley outside Beijing.
As director of the Epitaxial Graphene Interdisciplinary Research Group at Georgia Tech, de Heer espouses the paradoxical new findings of “condensed matter physics.” This efflorescent field enables scores of new materials that behave in ways previously regarded as violations of physical law, with graphene being a preeminent example.
Graphene, a two-dimensional (single atom thick) layer of carbon, is radically superior to silicon in thermal and electrical conductivity, flexibility, optical bandwidth and sensitivity, tensile strength and carrier speed. Electrons on the edges of a graphene ribbon travel ballistically, at a million meters a second. “Spin protected,” they move independent of temperature with no backscattering.
By contrast, you may imagine, as I did, that copper is a fast conductor. But in three-dimensional copper, electrons constantly bump into each other and into the molecular structure of the material, with the result that they end up travelling at a speed of roughly a millimeter per second or millions of times more slowly than in graphene, with all that bumping wasting power as heat.
Graphene has long been envied by semiconductor researchers for its potential to yield transistors a thousand times faster than today’s but generating a diminutive fraction of the heat. With the dismantling of refrigerator towers and other thermodynamic contraptions, the graphene transistor could make today’s giant centralized data centers cool and small and distributed again.
The critical problem is that graphene is more a semimetal than a semiconductor. As an always-on near superconductor, it cannot readily be made to switch on and off, one and zero, the essential function of a transistor. It has no bandgap. This was the challenge de Heer decided to overcome—even before the world knew of graphene’s existence. He would figure out how to make graphene a semiconductor while retaining its fantastic conductivity. He launched what would become a two-decade-long effort to inscribe electronic circuitry on graphene films that were “epitaxially” grown on semi-conducting silicon carbide wafers.
Yet, de Heer found scant support in the United States for his world-changing mission in graphene. In 2011, a team at IBM in Yorktown Heights led by Keith Jenkins achieved momentous advances on the de Heer agenda, but support dwindled in the face of obstacles and distractions.
Walter de Heer knew that great discoveries emerge from human genius and entrepreneurial science wherever it may emerge rather than from nationalist missiles and omertas. This lesson is inexorable and manifests itself repeatedly, from the time of the Manhattan Project when Hitler attempted to nationalize nuclear physics (no Jews allowed) to our current attempts to nationalize microchip physics.
Thus in 2015, de Heer radically expanded his talent pool—to China. Working with his former post-doctoral assistant at Georgia Tech, Lei Ma, the Dutch researcher helped to establish the Tianjin International Center for Nanoparticles and Nanosystems (TICNN) at China’s oldest University, Tianjin, where he served as institute director.
In certain Washington quarters, however, the scientific collaboration between Atlanta and Tianjin was regarded as far too close to treason. Politicians increasingly pressured the U.S. government to treat intercourse in physics as a crime. In 2020, U.S. hostility to collaborative research with the Chinese forced de Heer to surrender his post as director.
Fortunately for the world, and despite considerable obstacles and inconveniences, de Heer was able to continue his collaboration remotely as an advisor.
We say the world was fortunate, because early in January 2024, de Heer and his colleagues from both Georgia Tech and Tianjin published what may well prove one of paramount discoveries in the history of microelectronics (which in part, thanks to their discovery, can become nano-electronics). Coauthored by Chinese, American (and Dutch!) scholars, and published in Nature, this paper signifies laboratory breakthroughs that will ultimately change the world as much again as Intel’s 1971 invention of the microprocessor. It will be hailed as the beginning of the end of the silicon era and a herald of the age of graphene.
By summoning graphene from a silicon carbide (SiC) substrate in an “epitaxial” layer (with defined orientation relative to a material pattern below) de Heer and his Chinese and American colleagues created a graphene semiconductor.
The feat entailed heating the silicon carbide in a controlled process in a quartz tube until the silicon was sublimated (emitted as a gas) from the top of the substrate leaving a single atomic layer of carbon—graphene—behind. The result was a perfect graphene semiconducting film with covalent bonds (super-strong links) into the silicon carbide. As a semiconductor, it could switch on and off while retaining graphene’s extraordinary advantages over silicon.
As De Heer explains, “graphene’s power lies in its flat, two-dimensional structure that is held together by the strongest chemical bonds known.” As such “it was clear from the beginning that graphene can be miniaturized to a far greater extent than silicon — enabling much smaller devices, while operating at higher speeds and producing much less heat. This means that, in principle, more devices can be packed on a single span of graphene than with silicon.”
De Heer warns that between “in principle” and “in production” may loom another decade of development. Still, a great advantage for the graphene on silicon carbide (SiC) chip is that silicon carbide microchips, crucial to high-voltage power control applications in, for instance, electric cars, are already produced by the tens of millions today. Silicon carbide devices use the same essential processes that make classic silicon wafers. With setbacks on the electrical vehicular front, silicon carbide currently even faces a glut.
Today, still near the top of its predictable learning curve, silicon carbide is just five times more costly than silicon. That may sound prohibitive until you realize that SiC, with de Heer’s process, promises to yield wafer-scale graphene sheets with features thousands of times superior to silicon.
With the end of Moore’s Law in sight, with alarms of a heat crisis afflicting all the giant data centers of the world, most of the power at wafer fabs now is devoted to dispelling heat rather than distilling nanofeatures. In the AI revolution, these centralized systems are increasing computational resources massively. A “Jensen’s Law” is propounded by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang of 1,000 fold advances every eight years.
The cost of this invidious law, however, may be to make computation less accessible and trustworthy, more proprietary and secret in giant, singular datacenters. By imparting new forces of decentralization, openness, and availability, graphene promises to banish the silicon heat crisis, the density impasse, and the rising complexities of the three-dimensional buildup of new transistor structures.
De Heer has been working toward this goal for some 25 years, well before Andrei Geim and Kosta Novelosov’s Nobel-Prize-winning “discovery” of graphene. Critical to his eventual success were his two years in China where he gained an investment of $10 million and his team of enthusiastic Chinese collaborators.
This breakthrough could not have come without the cooperation of Tianjin and Georgia Tech. It’s an American-Chinese triumph.
Meanwhile Huawei, one of the two or three most creative telecom companies in the world, hated and slandered and banned by U.S. officials, won the first patents on graphene transistors and wafers.
China and the United States have been cooperating for years and leading the world economy before the politicians declared the research to be treason and nationalized knowledge.
The great crisis in the world economy today is the divergence between China and the United States. Cooperating less, both countries are doing worse as a result. All the restrictions, sanctions, and conflicts are less than zero-sum, they are lose-lose. When Georgia Tech and Tianjin University together launched this new semiconductor epigraphene, both sides won.
That kind of breakthrough is what happens when the United States and China work together. There’s still lots of opportunity. Politicians come and go; and creativity, innovation, and learning, all can flourish despite the conflicts and distractions that the politicians inflict.
China should fight back against these pressures that are coming from the United States and should continue to foster the entrepreneurial carnival that China has become. Let there be thousands of new companies in energy, from nuclear to coal, in new chip companies, wafer fab equipment companies. Welcome new startups in specialized AI chips that, for key machine learning tasks, perform 10 times faster than existing Nvidia graphics processing units. Such innovations are the hope of the world economy.
Chinese leaders should ignore American politicians who seek popularity by arousing fear and distrust of China, ignoring as well Chinese who respond in kind.
Unshackle cooperation between genius in China and the United States and launch a new era of global creativity, productivity, and peace.
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