High-end chips can be produced without lithography, and Chinese scientists have made new breakthroughs in transistor research.

CTOnews.com, May 26 (Xinhua) the performance of traditional semiconductor chips mainly depends on the dense stacking of multilayer transistors. Now, with the emerging artificial intelligence, the components needed to develop computer chips are becoming more and more expensive.

Atomic transistor research led by Zhu Jiadi, a Chinese scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), made a breakthrough in April. The project uses a layer-by-layer stacking process of meteorological precipitation, eliminating the need for a lithography machine to produce chips with a process of one nanometer or less. This will reduce the size of the computer to only 1/1000 of its current size and consume only 1/1000 of its current power consumption.

▲ source MIT website the new transistor is only about three atoms thick, so it can be stacked to make cheaper, more powerful chips. As a result, researchers at MIT have developed a new technology that can effectively and efficiently "grow" metal disulfide (TMD) material layers directly on fully manufactured silicon chips to achieve more intensive integration of chip transistors.

Since the chip manufacturing process usually requires a temperature of about 600 degrees Celsius, and silicon transistors and circuits may be damaged when heated to more than 400 degrees Celsius, "growing" transistor materials directly onto silicon wafers is a major challenge.

Now, an interdisciplinary team of MIT researchers has developed a low-temperature "growth" process that does not damage the chip. This technology allows two-dimensional semiconductor transistors to be directly integrated into standard silicon circuits.

The new technology can also significantly reduce the time required to grow these materials. The previous method takes more than a day to make single-layer two-dimensional materials for chips, while the new method can "grow" a uniform layer of metal disulfide (TMD) on the entire 8-inch wafer in less than an hour.

CTOnews.com believes that if the new technology is officially launched, it could significantly reduce the cost of current chips, thereby reducing the price of the entire hardware market.