Once having resolved that basic roadblock, it was shown that resultant SiGe materials could be manufactured into high performance electronics[8] using conventional low cost silicon processing toolsets.
More relevant, the performance of resulting transistors far exceeded what was then thought to be the limit of traditionally manufactured silicon devices, enabling a new generation of low cost commercial wireless technologies[9] such as WiFi.
SiGe processes achieve costs similar to those of silicon CMOS manufacturing and are lower than those of other heterojunction technologies such as gallium arsenide.
AMD disclosed a joint development with IBM for a SiGe stressed-silicon technology,[12] targeting the 65 nm process.
[18] By controlling the composition of a hexagonal SiGe alloy, researchers from Eindhoven University of Technology developed a material that can emit light.
[19] In combination with its electronic properties, this opens up the possibility of producing a laser integrated into a single chip to enable data transfer using light instead of electric current, speeding up data transfer while reducing energy consumption and need for cooling systems.
The international team, with lead authors Elham Fadaly, Alain Dijkstra and Erik Bakkers at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands and Jens Renè Suckert at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena in Germany, were awarded the 2020 Breakthrough of the Year award by the magazine Physics World.