Tech
Atomic neighborhoods in semiconductors provide new avenue for designing microelectronics
Inside the microchips powering the device you’re reading this on, the atoms have a hidden order all their own. A team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and George Washington University has confirmed that atoms in semiconductors will arrange themselves in distinctive localized patterns that change the material’s electronic behavior.
The research, published in Science, may provide a foundation for designing specialized semiconductors for quantum-computing and optoelectronic devices for defense technologies.
On the atomic scale, semiconductors are crystals made of different elements arranged in repeating lattice structures. Many semiconductors are made primarily of one element with a few others added to the mix in small quantities. There aren’t enough of these trace additives to cause a repeating pattern throughout the material, but how these atoms are arranged next to their immediate neighbors has long been a mystery.
Do the rare ingredients just settle randomly among the predominant atoms during material synthesis, or do the atoms have preferred arrangements, a phenomenon seen in other materials called short-range order (SRO)? Until now, no microscopy or characterization technique could zoom in close enough, and with enough clarity, to examine tiny regions of the crystal structure and directly interpret the SRO.
“It’s an interesting scientific question because SRO dramatically changes the properties of a material. Our colleagues have predicted SRO theoretically in semiconductors, but this is the first time the individual structure of these SRO domains has been shown experimentally,” said co-lead author Andrew Minor, director of the National Center for Electron Microscopy at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry and a professor of Materials Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley.
Minor’s lab is part of the Center for Manipulation of Atomic Ordering for Manufacturing Semiconductors (µ-Atoms), a Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Frontier Research Center focused on understanding atomic ordering in semiconductors. “Our results are exciting because the property that’s being changed by this local ordering is the most important property for microelectronics, the band gap, which is what controls the electronic properties,” he said.
The breakthrough moment came when first author Lilian Vogl, who was then a postdoctoral researcher in Minor’s lab, was studying a sample of germanium containing a small amount of tin and silicon using a powerful type of electron microscopy recently pioneered by the group called 4D-STEM. The initial results were too muddled to parse the faint signals from the electrons diffracting off the tin and silicon from the strong signals off the tidily arranged germanium, so she implemented an energy-filtering device on the system to improve contrast.
When the next dataset started appearing on her monitor, she quickly realized there was a new kind of result. The faint signals were clearer, and repeating patterns emerged, indicating that the atoms have preferred order after all.
To validate her findings and learn what these patterns meant, Vogl collected more data with the energy-filtering 4D-STEM and used a pre-trained neural network to sort the diffraction images. The tool identified six recurring motifs representing particular atomic arrangements in the sample material, but the Berkeley Lab team still couldn’t determine the exact atomic structures that were generating the motifs. To interpret their experimental results, they turned to µ-Atoms collaborators at George Washington University led by co-lead author Tianshu Li, a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Li’s team generated a highly accurate and efficient machine-learning potential capable of modeling millions of atoms in the material’s structure, allowing Vogl to perform simulated 4D-STEM on different possible structural arrangements until she found matches for the motifs in the experimental data.
“It’s remarkable that modeling and experiment can work seamlessly to unravel SRO structural motifs for the first time,” said Li, whose team had previously predicted SRO and its impact and helped motivate the current study.
“Proving SRO experimentally is not an easy task, let alone identifying its structural motifs. Signals from SRO can easily be obscured by defects or inherent movement of atoms at room temperature, and until now there was no clear way to separate them. This work represents the first step toward our broader goal.”
Shunda Chen, a research scientist in Li’s group who developed the model, said, “With these models, which combine machine learning with first-principles calculations, we can replicate experimental procedures with high fidelity and pinpoint the structural motifs that would otherwise remain hidden.”
Follow-up work initiated by other µ-Atoms members at the University of Arkansas and at Sandia National Laboratories is already yielding insights into how these short range-order motifs affect the semiconductor’s electronic properties, and the scientists hope that manipulating the order to enable new types of devices and processing routes will be possible soon.
“We’re going to be able to really push the boundaries beyond current capabilities by designing semiconductors at the atomic scale,” said Vogl, who is now group leader of the Environmental & Analytical Electron Microscopy Group at the Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials.
“We are opening the door to a new era of information technology at the atomic scale, unlocking the deterministic placement of SRO motifs for tailoring of band structures that could impact a wide variety of technologies, from topological quantum materials to neuromorphic computing to optical detectors.”
More information:
Lilian M. Vogl et al, Identification of short-range ordering motifs in semiconductors, Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.adu0719
Citation:
Atomic neighborhoods in semiconductors provide new avenue for designing microelectronics (2025, September 25)
retrieved 25 September 2025
from https://techxplore.com/news/2025-09-atomic-neighborhoods-semiconductors-avenue-microelectronics.html
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Want Google out of your life? It’s pretty easy to find alternative search, email, and photo storage providers, but it’s much harder to come up with a mobile operating system that’s free of Google. The obvious answer is an iPhone, but if you want Google out of your life, you probably don’t want to immediately replace it with Apple. While a little better from a privacy standpoint, Apple is still not great.
Fear not, privacy-conscious WIRED reader, there are alternatives to Android. Technically speaking, most alternative mobile operating systems are based on Android, not alternatives to it, but these various projects all remove Google and Google-related services (to varying degrees) from the system. Typically that means all the Google services are stripped out and replaced with some alternative code (usually the micro g project), which is then sandboxed in some way to isolate it and restrict what it has access to. The result is a phone that is less dependent on Google, pries less into your privacy, and sometimes might offer a more secure experience. However, at their core, these are all still based on Android.
If you want a true alternative to Android, there are a few. I am sorry to say, free software fans, the best and most functional alternative to Android is still iOS. Most people looking for Android alternatives are not, however, looking to switch to an Apple device. There are a couple of Linux-based phone systems out there, most notably SailfishOS, which can run Android apps (I will be testing this next), but in my testing, none of the Linux-based operating systems are ready to be your everyday device.
Jump To:
Why De-Google Your Phone?
First off, you don’t have to remove Google. There are plenty of people happily running Google Services on LineageOS just because they want to tinker with the system and expand the capabilities of their phones. That’s a fine reason to dive into the world of Android alternatives.
Still, you don’t have to have a nice tinfoil hat to know that Google’s privacy record is laughable. De-Googling your phone is a way of enjoying the convenience of having a smartphone without sharing everything you do with Google and every app that takes advantage of its APIs. Should you be able to participate in the technological world without trading your privacy to do so? I think so, and that’s why I’ve used an Android alternative, GrapheneOS, for more than five years.
What Is the Android Open Source Project?
Google’s Android mobile operating system is open source, which means anyone can, in theory, build their own mobile operating system based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). The AOSP just provides a base, though. There is much more to a mobile operating system than just the underlying code.
Android’s operating system may be open source, but it runs device-specific drivers and Google’s various Play Services application programming interfaces (APIs) with a suite of built-in apps for basic functionality. All of this stuff is another layer atop the Android operating system, and it’s this layer that’s very difficult for other projects to reproduce. It’s not hard for projects to get the AOSP code running, but it’s difficult to create a great mobile user experience on top, which is why the list of good de-Googled Android alternatives is short.
What Is the Bootloader and Why Is It Locked?
The bootloader is a piece of code that allows you to change which software boots up on your phone. The manufacturer of your phone puts a cryptographic key on the phone, the public read-only key. When an update is released, the manufacturer signs the update, and when the phone gets the update, it checks to make sure the signature matches the key. If it does, it applies the update, and if it doesn’t match it doesn’t. This is basic security and protects your device, but it also prevents you from loading another operating system, so one of the first things you’ll do when installing one of these de-Googled operating systems is unlock the bootloader.
Then you install the OS you want to install and then … you probably don’t relock the bootloader because most of the time that won’t work. This is why Pixel phones are popular with people who like to tinker and customize, because you can relock the bootloader on Pixels (and a handful of others), but by and large most people using alternative OSes just live with an unlocked bootloader. It’s not ideal, it’s a security vulnerability, but there’s also not a good solution aside from saying, get a Pixel.
Apple’s iOS does offer more privacy features than stock Android. In my experience, it’s a fine operating system, but it is still very tightly coupled to Apple. Sure, you can avoid iCloud, run your own syncing software, and not use Apple’s various tools, but to do that you’ll be fighting the phone every step of the way. If iOS works for you, that’s great, but for a lot of us, a de-Googled Android phone is just easier to use and more convenient.
Best Preinstalled Phone: Fairphone 6 With /e/OS
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Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
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Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
Fairphone
Fairphone (6th Gen, /e/OS)
The best de-Googled phone experience for most people is going to be Murena’s /e/OS version of the Fairphone 6. Not only does it offer the full /e/OS experience out of the box, with a strong focus on privacy and blocking apps from tracking you, but the Fairphone hardware is repairable, the battery replaceable, and the bootloader is locked. The catch, if you’re in the United States, is that the Fairphone 6 only works with T-Mobile and its MVNOs. Somewhat ironically, it worked great on GoogleFi when editor Julian Chokkattu tested it last year. I tested it using T-Mobile’s prepaid plan, as well as RedPocket’s T-Mobile-based service, and had no issues with either.
The Fairphone 6 gets even better when you put /e/OS on it. Thanks to the privacy-first design of /e/OS, apps no longer track you, but they do still work 99 percent of the time, which is often not the case with some apps on alternate OSes (looking at you, banking apps).
The core of the privacy features in /e/OS revolve around the Advanced Privacy app and widget. Here you can block (or chose to allow) in-app trackers, and there are other features such as hiding your IP address or geolocation when you feel like it. The IP and geo-spoofing are nice for limited-use cases, but the main privacy feature for most of us is the ability to block trackers in apps—and it turns out there are a lot of those.
Murena also ships /e/OS with a very nice custom app store, the App Lounge. It’s similar to the Play Store, but with extras like privacy information about each app. Under each listing in the App Lounge you’ll see a grade from 1 to 10, where 1 is horrible for privacy and 10 generally means no trackers. The App Lounge also grades apps according to which permissions they require. The fewer permissions (like access to your photos or geodata), the higher the rating.
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Courtesy of Lola Blankets
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Lola Blankets
The Original Lola
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Courtesy of Lola Blankets
Lola Blankets
Weighted Lola
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