A microprocessor based on a two-dimensional semiconductor

By Stefan Wachter, Dmitry K. Polyushkin, Ole Bethge, Thomas Mueller. Nature Communications, 2016

379 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The advent of microcomputers in the 1970s has dramatically changed our society. Since then, microprocessors have been made almost exclusively from silicon, but the ever-increasing demand for higher integration density and speed, lower power consumption and better integrability with everyday goods has prompted the search for alternatives. Germanium and III–V compound semiconductors are being considered promising candidates for future high-performance processor generations and chips based on thin-film plastic technology or carbon nanotubes could allow for embedding electronic intelligence into arbitrary objects for the Internet-of-Things. Here, we present a 1-bit implementation of a microprocessor using a two-dimensional semiconductor—molybdenum disulfide. The device can execute user-defined programs stored in an external memory, perform logical operations and communicate with its periphery. Our 1-bit design is readily scalable to multi-bit data. The device consists of 115 transistors and constitutes the most complex circuitry so far made from a two-dimensional material. Two-dimensional materials are receiving increasing interest as they could pave the way to a paradigm shift in nano-electronics. Here, the authors demonstrate a 1-bit implementation of a microprocessor consisting of 115 transistors, using atomically thin MoS2.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4941e56b145a3b7719766916cc9a65940cdb55b2

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Citations in the corpus

Ultrafast machine vision with 2D material neural network image sensors (2020, background): “26 .”
Fabrication and Deterministic Transfer of High-Quality Quantum Emitters in Hexagonal Boron Nitride (2017, background): “the lower limit set by a longpass lter used to lter out the excitation laser and the upper limit set by the spectrometer bandwidth. The linewidths vary from as low as 1:31(7)nm (see gure 2(g)) to 11:6(4)nm at room temperature, while the exciton lifetimes span a smaller range from 294(3)ps to 1:32(1)”
Logic-in-Memory Based on an Atomically Thin Semiconductor (2020, positive): “This makes it an appealing choice for both next-generation logic circuits 26,27 and memories in the form of floating-gate field-effect transistors (FGFET) 28–31 , which is an attractive device for in-memory computing.”
The development of flexible integrated circuits based on thin-film transistors (2018, methodology): “In addition, 1-bit scalable microprocessor architectures have been demonstrated based on different emerging foil-compatible semiconductors, namely carbon nanotubes 12 and two-dimensional materials 49 .”