Germanium was the basic material of first-generation transistors in the late 1940s and early 1950s before it was replaced by silicon (the first silicon transistor was produced by Texas Instruments in 1954). Using germanium instead of silicon as transistor material would enable faster chips containing smaller transistors because higher switching speeds than in silicon could be achieved using germanium. A novel fabrication route demonstrated by a research team in Australia, using a combination of scanning tunneling microscope (STM) lithography and high-quality crystal growth, opens up an entire new area where quantum behavior of highly confined electrons in germanium can be studied for the first time.