- The new growth method runs 1,000 times faster than conventional techniques
- Liquid gold and tungsten form the double layer substrate for this process
- Monolayer tungsten silicon nitride film reached 1.4 times 0.7 inches in size
Chinese researchers have developed a wafer-scale 2D semiconductor growth method that works about 1,000 times faster than conventional techniques.
The team from the Institute of Metal Research reengineered the chemical vapor deposition process by introducing a liquid gold and tungsten bilayer as the substrate.
This method enabled wafer-scale growth of monolayer tungsten silicon nitride films with tunable doping properties.
The article continues below
Why 2D materials matter for future chips
The resulting films reached dimensions of about 1.4 x 0.7 inches, marking a step toward scalable fabrication of high-performance 2D semiconductors.
For decades, Moore’s Law predicted a doubling of computing power roughly every two years—but as transistor dimensions approach atomic scales, quantum effects and heat dissipation make further miniaturization increasingly difficult.
2D semiconductors have emerged as a leading candidate for post-Moore chip materials as the increasing workloads of AI tools and large language models push current chip architectures to their limits.
Modern transistor architectures depend on the complementary pairing of n-type and p-type materials.
The lack of high-performance p-type options has become a major limitation for next-generation chip design, as while many n-type 2D semiconductors are well established, achieving stable p-type counterparts remains a challenge.
“The lack of high-performance p-type materials has become a critical bottleneck for the development of sub-5 nanometer node 2D semiconductors,” said Zhu Mengjian of the National University of Defense Technology.
The single-layer tungsten-silicon nitride films combine several important advantages for advanced transistor design.
These include strong hole mobility, high on-state current density, mechanical strength, efficient heat dissipation, and chemical stability.
The method expands single crystal domains to sub-millimeter sizes and increases the production rate from approx. 0.00004 inch over five hours to approx. 0.0008 inch per minute.
This represents an increase of about 1,000 times compared to conventional approaches.
The research represents progress in 2D semiconductor fabrication, but the gap between growing centimeter-scale films in a lab and mass-producing defect-free wafers remains vast.
Although the gold-based substrate is effective for research, it would be prohibitively expensive for high-volume production.
China’s ambition to leapfrog existing semiconductor restrictions is understandable, and this study is a breakthrough.
Unfortunately, the industry has seen many promising 2D materials fail to make the transition from academic papers to fabrication facilities.
Whether this material follows the same path will depend on solving the scalability and cost challenges that have doomed previous options.
Via Interesting technique
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews and opinions in your feeds. Be sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can too follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, video unboxings, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp also.
