Lausanne – Not only graphene, two new two-dimensional materials promise to revolutionize the future of technology. In a study just published in the journal “Nature Communications” (http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12585), researchers at the University of Pisa and the EPFL have shown that arsenéne and antimonéne, two-dimensional materials composed of arsenic and antimony, may allow to achieve high-performance transistor with the channel length of only 5 nm, not achievable with silicon. To understand the effects of miniaturization in this field, just think that the phone in our pockets is now a powerful computer thanks to the fact that the semiconductor industry has achieved over the last 50 years smaller and smaller transistors and doubling every 24 months the number contained in a chip. To sustain this pace of innovation, commonly called Moore’s Law, in research laboratories around the world people are exploring the use of new two-dimensional materials, which have the thickness of a single atom and so promise a further reduction in the overall size of transistor. (9Colonne)
