A Taiwanese research team has extended and potentially laid the groundwork for going beyond Moore’s Law with a monolayer diode, which could lead to a major breakthrough in the semiconductor industry, the Ministry of Science and Technology told a news conference yesterday.
Supported by the ministry, a research team led by National Cheng Kung University professor Wu Chung-lin (吳忠霖) and National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center assistant scientist Chen Chia-hao (陳家浩) on Aug. 7 published its research results on developing a 2D monolayer diode in Nature Communications.
The electrodes of the diode are made of 2D nonmetallic elements, tungsten diselenide and graphene, which demonstrate great semiconducting ability in an atomic monolayer that is only 0.7 nanometer (nm) wide, the ministry said.
Compared with common silicon semiconductors, for which transistor channel size has hit a hard limit at 3nm wide, the monolayer diode is thinner, smaller and faster, it said.
As a result, it has the potential to move beyond Moore’s Law and meet the manufacturing needs of a new generation of energy-saving ICs, the ministry added.
Moore’s Law is a prediction made by Intel Corp cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965 that the number of transistors on a chip would double every 18 to 24 months. It has since become a guiding principle in the computer chip industry.
However, in the past few years the physical transistor channel size limit has been reached and the consequent challenges faced by the industry have given rise to questions as to whether the speed of innovation suggested by the law might have ended.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) founder Morris Chang (張忠謀) last year said that the law is likely to remain relevant for another decade.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
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