Moore's Law's dead? The Chinese offered to replace silicon.
Silicon transistors are approaching the physical limit of miniaturization – on atomic scales, the overheating and the complexity of lithographs do not allow the elements to be further reduced. Moore’s law, which for decades predicted the doubling of computing power every two years, actually rests against the wall. The problem is especially acute against the background of growing loads on the part of artificial intelligence systems and large language models. The industry is looking for an alternative – and one of the most promising areas is considered two-dimensional semiconductors with a thickness of one atom.
The main obstacle to the practical application of such materials is the lack of high-quality p-type semiconductors. Modern transistors work on complementary pairs: n-type (with excess electrons) and p-type (with an excess of "hole"). Two-dimensional materials of the n-type like disulfid and molybben dyselenide have already been well studied, but stable and productive p-analogues have not yet been created, writes the South China Morning Post. Without a balance between the two types of semiconductors, it is impossible to design reliable chips on nodes of less than five nanometers.
The team of the Institute for the Study of Metals of the Chinese Academy of Sciences led by Zhu Mangian, Ren Wenzai and Xu Chuan proposed a fundamentally new approach to the cultivation of two-dimensional semiconductor films. The researchers recycled the chemical deposition method from the gas phase (CVD), replacing the standard substrate with a two-layer structure of liquid gold and tungsten. On such a substrate, it was possible to grow monolayer films of tungsten silicon nitride with customizable alloy properties - about 36 by 18 millimeters.
The growth rate of crystals has increased by about a thousand times: instead of a micrometer for five hours, the film grows at a speed of about 20 micrometers per minute. Monocrystalline domains with a new method reach submillimeter sizes, which is critically important for industrial scaling.
The resulting material combines several valuable characteristics at once: high mobility of the holes, high current density in the oncoming state, mechanical strength, effective heat removal and chemical stability. The set of properties makes tungsten silicon nitride a strong candidate for new generation transistors.
The ability to grow large films with accurate alloy control brings two-dimensional semiconductors closer to real production. The new technology opens the way to the integration of atomically thin materials into the CMOS architecture – the basis of modern microelectronics.
Silicon transistors are approaching the physical limit of miniaturization – on atomic scales, the overheating and the complexity of lithographs do not allow the elements to be further reduced. Moore’s law, which for decades predicted the doubling of computing power every two years, actually rests against the wall. The problem is especially acute against the background of growing loads on the part of artificial intelligence systems and large language models. The industry is looking for an alternative – and one of the most promising areas is considered two-dimensional semiconductors with a thickness of one atom.
The main obstacle to the practical application of such materials is the lack of high-quality p-type semiconductors. Modern transistors work on complementary pairs: n-type (with excess electrons) and p-type (with an excess of "hole"). Two-dimensional materials of the n-type like disulfid and molybben dyselenide have already been well studied, but stable and productive p-analogues have not yet been created, writes the South China Morning Post. Without a balance between the two types of semiconductors, it is impossible to design reliable chips on nodes of less than five nanometers.
The team of the Institute for the Study of Metals of the Chinese Academy of Sciences led by Zhu Mangian, Ren Wenzai and Xu Chuan proposed a fundamentally new approach to the cultivation of two-dimensional semiconductor films. The researchers recycled the chemical deposition method from the gas phase (CVD), replacing the standard substrate with a two-layer structure of liquid gold and tungsten. On such a substrate, it was possible to grow monolayer films of tungsten silicon nitride with customizable alloy properties - about 36 by 18 millimeters.
The growth rate of crystals has increased by about a thousand times: instead of a micrometer for five hours, the film grows at a speed of about 20 micrometers per minute. Monocrystalline domains with a new method reach submillimeter sizes, which is critically important for industrial scaling.
The resulting material combines several valuable characteristics at once: high mobility of the holes, high current density in the oncoming state, mechanical strength, effective heat removal and chemical stability. The set of properties makes tungsten silicon nitride a strong candidate for new generation transistors.
The ability to grow large films with accurate alloy control brings two-dimensional semiconductors closer to real production. The new technology opens the way to the integration of atomically thin materials into the CMOS architecture – the basis of modern microelectronics.
