Korean scientists develop tech for sub-nanometer chip

SEOUL, Feb. 2 (UPI) -- A team of scientists at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology said Friday they have developed the technologies necessary for sub-nanometer-scale semiconductors.

The team, headed by KAIST Professor Lee Ka-young, said the novel technology takes advantage of a new substance called ambipolar molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), instead of the conventional silicon.

Two Asian chipmakers, Samsung Electronics and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., are adopting the latest technology, use the 3-nanometer process.

The two companies and their U.S. rival Intel are set to begin mass production of chips based on the 2-nanometer process, while also working on the sub-nanometer scale.

One nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. A human hair is between 50,000 and 100,000 nanometers thick.

Chipmakers are trying to make the products more compact because the smaller the transistors on a chip, the higher its performance and lower its power consumption.

"The world is now competing to develop computer chip nodes targeting 1 nanometer and smaller. Against such development, traditional silicon is not a good substance due to such problems as the short-channel effects," Lee told UPI News Korea.

"MoS2 is superior in that it can efficiently deal with such problems due to its unique structure. However, scientists have struggled to make an ambipolar semiconductor with it. Against this backdrop, we showed simple strategies to achieve high-performance ambipolar MoS2 devices," she said.

The short-channel effects happen in very large-scaled integrated circuits made with super-small devices, negatively affecting their performance owing to issues such as current leakage.

An ambipolar semiconductor means that it is designed to transport both positive and negative charges, the basic feature necessary for chips.

Lee added that her team's new findings would have another advantage called multifunctionality, as the MoS2-based device can operate as a transistor, a diode and a photodetector.

The research was recently featured in the peer-reviewed scientific journal American Chemical Society Nano.