When Gordon Moore first articulated his law of miniaturization in microelectronics manufacturing in 1965, silicon had only recently become the predominant material of that industry. In the ‘50s and early ‘60s, silicon beat out alternatives such as germanium. Over the next 50 years many other exotic microelectronics materials were proposed and investigated, but none seriously threatened silicon. These exotic alternatives – e.g., compound semiconductors, molecular electronics, superconductors, carbon nanotubes, etc. – hovered at the edges of the microelectronics industry. The enormous infrastructure dedicated to silicon, and the steady progress in circuits made from silicon, meant few firms were willing to develop a parallel infrastructure devoted to an unproven alternative. Yet as the infrastructure devoted to silicon became ever more capital- and technology-intensive, and Moore’s Law more difficult to sustain, alternatives to silicon promised another way forward. The first published statement of “Moore’s Law” (not called that at the time) was in Electronics Magazine. Journals of this type are usually referred to as the “trade press” because they circulate information among industry insiders and observers about the “trade” in which they are engaged. In this paper, however, I approach Electronics Magazines and its peers as what Kaplan and Radin have recently called “para-scientific media” – that is, outlets that are not heavily technical and do not play the same priority-staking role that scientific journals do, but that nevertheless actively construct the boundaries of technical communities. Exotic alternatives to silicon have been a recurrent object of fascination for the para-scientific media of the microelectronics industry. Semiconductor industry insiders need to know about them without investing too many resources into knowing about them; while proponents of these alternative materials need to signal to the semiconductor industry when they are ready for more intensive examination. The para-scientific media of microelectronics are perfectly positioned to facilitate that exchange. In this paper, I survey para-scientific microelectronics journals (Electronics Magazine, EE Times, IEEE Spectrum, etc.) from the late ‘60s to the present to see how they have presented exotic microelectronics materials, and how they have used those materials to construct the fluid boundaries between industry “insiders” and “outsiders.”