Researchers discovered three very difficult techniques that effectively prevented them from realizing the potential exhibited by semiconducting 2D materials, a key ingredient for creating new atom-thick transistors capable of resetting Moore’s Law. solved the problem. Thanks to the work of a multi-institutional team of researchers, the production of his 2D materials of high quality on a commercial scale seems to have been solved.
Advances in semiconductor development are threatened by natural constraints imposed by the methods of manufacturing transistors and the materials used. This barrier to Moore’s Law has long loomed, and visionary scientists have researched and developed alternative routes to achieve the much-needed, continuous improvement.
One of the most practical ways the semiconductor industry could gain new momentum is to replace silicon with so-called 2D materials to create 2D transistors. Scientists looking closely at 2D materials highlight several attractive properties that help greatly improve performance, efficiency, and scalability. For example, Intel’s Components Research (CR) Group recently published nine research papers. Some of them tout the use of new 2D materials as a route to developing processors with more than 1 trillion transistors by 2030.
An international group of scientists claims that three key challenges to the commercialization of 2D materials have now been resolved, enabling the fabrication of 2D materials in monocrystalline form on silicon wafers. increase. These challenges are specifically described as follows:
- Precise kinetic control of layer-by-layer 2D material growth,
- maintain a single domain during growth for uniform thickness,
- Wafer-scale controllability of layer number and crystallinity.
You can read the full paper for details on each of these challenges and how they were solved by a process invented by a multi-institutional team.The work is written in detail on paper (opens in new tab) It was published by Nature under the title “Non-epitaxial Single-Crystal 2D Material Growth by Geometric Confinement.”
Sang-Hoon Bae, one of the project leaders and a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Washington University’s McKelvie School of Engineering in St. Louis, seems confident in the research’s implications. “Our confined growth technique brings all the exciting discoveries in 2D materials physics to the level of commercialization by enabling single-domain, layer-by-layer heterojunctions to be constructed at the wafer scale. I believe we can,” he explains Bae. “Our work will lay a strong foundation for 2D materials suitable for industrial environments.”
As with all research of this kind, it may be many years before 2D materials are put to practical use. However, companies such as Intel and Samsung are heavily involved in the project, and the fact that Intel already has his 2D Gate All Around (GAA) transistor in its research pipeline makes that future more likely than you think. It may come sooner than it is.
