A 32-bit processor made with an atomically thin semiconductor

On Wednesday, a team of researchers from China used a paper published in Nature to describe a 32-bit RISC-V processor built using molybdenum disulfide instead of silicon as the semiconductor. For those not up on their chemistry, molybdenum disulfide is a bit like graphene: a single molecule of MoS 2 is a sheet that is only a bit over a single atom thick, due to the angles between its chemical bonds. But unlike graphene, molybdenum disulfide is a semiconductor. The material has been used in a variety of demonstration electronics, including flash storage and image sensors. But we've recently figured out how to generate wafer-scale sheets of MoS 2 on a sapphire substrate, and the team took advantage of that to build the processor, which they call RV32-WUJI. It can only add single bits at a time and is limited to kilohertz clock speeds, but it is capable of executing the full RISC-V 32-bit instruction set thanks to nearly 6,000 individual transistors. Going flat We've identified a wide ... Read full article.