The first logic circuits made using atom-thick sheets of a material called molybdenite suggest a possible new solution to the problem of getting more power out of silicon computer components.
It also establishes molybdenite as a competitor to graphene, the atom-thick sheets of carbon believed capable of solving silicon's shortcomings, and whose creators received a Nobel prize in 2010.
Silicon technology is in trouble because, for years, performance has been improved by shrinking the size of the features on silicon chips, but there is only so much more shrinking that can be done. Chips will go on sale this year with features as small as 22 nanometers, and at very small scales, silicon technology faces problems like oxidation, which reduces performance and causes energy losses.
Molybdenite, or MoS2, could allow electronics to get smaller still without such problems, says Andras Kis, who led a team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, to make the first integrated logic circuits, the basis of computer chips, using molybdenite sheets.
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