Focus Taiwan
Date: 2018/11/21
By: Pan Tzu-yu and Chi Jo-yao 

Taipei, Nov. 21 (CNA) A research team from Taiwan 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, according to the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) at a press conference Wednesday.

Supported by MOST, National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) and National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center (NSRRC), a research team headed by NCKU Professor Wu Chung-lin (吳忠霖) and NSRRC Assistant Scientist Chen Chia-hao (陳家浩), developed a two-dimensional (2D) monolayer diode and published its research results in Nature Communications on August 7.

MOST said the electrodes of the new diode are made of 2D nonmetallic elements Tungsten diselenide and graphene, which demonstrate great semiconducting transition in an atomic monolayer that is only 0.7 nanometer (nm) wide.

Compared to common silicon semiconductors, where transistor channel size has hit a hard limit at a width of 3 nm, the monolayer diode is thinner, smaller, and faster. 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 integrated circuits (IC), MOST added.
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