THE RIGHT STUFF.

AS PROMISING AS silicon carbide and gallium nitride are for making extraordinarily resilient electronics, they are difficult to manufacture on Earth without a lot of defects - we can make only small wafers of them here. FEATURES PHOTOGRAPHS BY SPENCER LOWELL WHEN I FIRST LEARNED about a material called silicon carbide, it blew my mind. Gallium nitride can electrically function at temperatures higher than 1,000 degrees C. In the clean rooms at the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility, my students and I build tiny gallium nitride transistors. Chips with a variety of high-temperature gallium nitride electronic devices could potentially be used under the extreme conditions at Venus. [Extracted from the article]