In solid state electronics, either pure silicon or germaniummay be used as the intrinsic semiconductorwhich forms the starting point for fabrication. Each has four valence electrons, but germanium will at a given temperature have more free electrons and a higher conductivity.
With Apple Silicon hardware being released later this year, what does the path look like for you to get your Electron app running on the new hardware?
With the release of Electron 11.0.0-beta.1, the Electron team is now shipping builds of Electron that run on the new Apple Silicon hardware that Apple plans on shipping later this year. You can grab the latest beta with npm install electron@beta or download it directly from our releases website.
How does it work?
Silicon Valence Electrons Have
- A neutral atom of silicon will have 4 valence electrons. The amount of valence electrons that a neutral atom will have can be found by the atoms group number in the periodic table.
- Jun 25, 2017 Silicon is part of Group 14. #C,Si, Ge, Sn, Pb#. Silicon thus has FOUR valence electrons, and its chemistry closely matches that of carbon (of course the chemistry of carbon dwarfs that of silicon). There are some (well-characterized) silicon(II) compounds.
- Apr 02, 2020 Silicon has an electron configuration of 1s 2 2s 2 2p 6 3s 2 3p 2. Using the noble gas notation, the electron configuration of silicon can be denoted by Ne 3s 2 3p 2. In the periodic table of elements, silicon is represented by the chemical symbol Si, atomic number 14 and relative atomic mass of 28.085.
As of Electron 11, we will be shipping separate versions of Electron for Intel Macs and Apple Silicon Macs. Prior to this change, we were already shipping two artifacts, darwin-x64 and mas-x64, with the latter being for Mac App Store compatibility usage. We are now shipping another two artifacts, darwin-arm64 and mas-arm64, which are the Apple Silicon equivalents of the aforementioned artifacts.
What do I need to do?
You will need to ship two versions of your app: one for x64 (Intel Mac) and one for arm64 (Apple Silicon). The good news is that electron-packager, electron-rebuild and electron-forge already support targeting the arm64 architecture. As long as you're running the latest versions of those packages, your app should work flawlessly once you update the target architecture to arm64.
In the future, we will release a package that allows you to 'merge' your arm64 and x64 apps into a single universal binary, but it's worth noting that this binary would be huge and probably isn't ideal for shipping to users.
Potential Issues
Native Modules
As you are targeting a new architecture, you'll need to update several dependencies which may cause build issues. The minimum version of certain dependencies are included below for your reference.
| Dependency | Version Requirement |
|---|---|
| Xcode | >=12.2.0 |
node-gyp | >=7.1.0 |
electron-rebuild | >=1.12.0 |
electron-packager | >=15.1.0 |
As a result of these dependency version requirements, you may have to fix/update certain native modules. One thing of note is that the Xcode upgrade will introduce a new version of the macOS SDK, which may cause build failures for your native modules.
Si Valence Electrons
How do I test it?
Currently, Apple Silicon applications only run on Apple Silicon hardware, which isn't commercially available at the time of writing this blog post. If you have a Developer Transition Kit, you can test your application on that. Otherwise, you'll have to wait for the release of production Apple Silicon hardware to test if your application works.
What about Rosetta 2?
Rosetta 2 is Apple's latest iteration of their Rosetta technology, which allows you to run x64 Intel applications on their new arm64 Apple Silicon hardware. Although we believe that x64 Electron apps will run under Rosetta 2, there are some important things to note (and reasons why you should ship a native arm64 binary).
- Your app's performance will be significantly degraded. Electron / V8 uses JIT compilation for JavaScript, and due to how Rosetta works, you will effectively be running JIT twice (once in V8 and once in Rosetta).
- You lose the benefit of new technology in Apple Silicon, such as the increased memory page size.
- Did we mention that the performance will be significantly degraded?
Silicon Valence Electrons Number
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Atomic Density | 5 x 1022 cm-3 5 x 1028 m-3 |
| Atomic Weight | 28.09 |
| Density (ρ) | 2.328 g cm-3 2328 kg m-3 |
| Energy Bandgap (EG) | 1.1242 eV |
| Intrinsic Carrier Concentration (ni) at 300K* | 1 x 1010 cm-3 1 x 1016 m-3 |
| Intrinsic Carrier Concentration (ni) at 25°C* | 8.6 x 109 cm-3 8.6 x 1015 m-3 |
| Lattice Constant | 0.543095 nm |
| Melting Point | 1415 °C |
| Thermal Conductivity | 1.5 Wcm-1K-1 150 Wm-1K-1 |
| Thermal Expansion Coefficient | 2.6 x 10-6 K-1 |
| Effective Density of States in the Conduction Band (NC) | 3 x 1019 cm-3 3 x 1025 m-3 |
| Effective Density of States in the Valence Band (NV) | 1 x 1019 cm-3 1 x 1025 m-3 |
| Relative Permittivity (εr) | 11.7 |
| Electron Affinity | 4.05 eV |
| Electron Diffusion Coefficient (De) | kT/q µe |
| Hole Diffusion Coefficient (Dh) | kT/q µh |
* updated values given in 12.
Properties of Silicon as a Function of Doping (300 K)
Carrier mobility is a function of carrier type and doping level. The values calculated here use the same formula as PC1D to fit values given in 3 and 456. Lifetime as a function of doping is given on bulk lifetime.
- 1., “Improved value for the silicon intrinsic carrier concentration at 300 K”, Applied Physics Letters, vol. 57, p. 255, 1990.
- 2., “Improved value for the silicon intrinsic carrier concentration from 275 to 375 K”, Journal of Applied Physics, vol. 70, pp. 846-854, 1991.
- 3., “Minority-carrier transport parameters in n-type silicon”, IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, vol. 37, pp. 1314 - 1322, 1990.
- 4., “Resistivity-Dopant Density Relationship for Boron-Doped Silicon”, Journal of The Electrochemical Society, vol. 127, pp. 2291-2294, 1980.
- 5., “Resistivity-Dopant Density Relationship for Phosphorus-Doped Silicon”, Journal of The Electrochemical Society, vol. 127, pp. 1807-1812, 1980.
- 6.“The Relationship Between Resistivity and Dopant Density for Phosphorus- and Boron-Doped Silicon”. U.S. Department of Commerce National Bureau of Standards, 1981.