A team at Fudan University has developed a new basic architecture to make chips smaller and more efficient.

The team led by professors Zhang Wei and Zhou Peng at Fudan's school of microelectronics published their results on Monday on the website of journal "Nature Nanotechnology."

A transistor based on two-dimensional material molybdic sulfide can realize calculations and data storage in a single cell, thanks to its two-surface channels.

"For decades, silicon has been the most commonly used material for integrated circuits and is the basis of many architectures used today,” said Zhou. “It is increasingly difficult to downsize silicon-based chips or other devices.”

At least two silicon transistors are needed to make a single basic logic gate (the elementary building block of a computing system). Computing and data storage take place in different areas of the silicon-based structure and data transmission between the two areas takes time. The transmission time limits data processing speed.

"With the two dimensional material, we can use only one transistor. Computing and data storage happen together,” he said.

"The work opens up new horizons for seeking promising solutions to future electronic device and novel circuit architecture. With this unique architecture of two dimensional materials, the transistor demonstrates a high area efficiency and fancy functions which is full of creativity, such as photoswitching logic and in situ memory. The exceptional application concept for next-generation integrated circuits of two-dimensional semiconductors will open a new gate to the computing and memory,” wrote the journal review committee. (shine.cn)