[klodolph]

It's a combination of chemistry and geometry (and other factors). Maybe there's some luck.

There are ICs and components built for operating in extreme environments, like drilling. You can get SiC (silicon carbide) chips that operate above 200°C (473K), if that's important to you. There are also various semiconductors that are worse than silicon at handling high temperatures, like germanium. Old germanium circuits sometimes don't even work correctly on a hot day.

If we lived at 200K, I'm sure that there's a host of semiconductor materials which would be available to us which don't work at 300K.