hafniumdiselenide
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Super-thin semiconductors delay the 'death' of silicon
Silicon has been the backbone of processors for decades, but it's rapidly approaching its physical limits: making a chip on a process smaller than 5 nanometers is usually impossible without introducing problems. How is Moore's Law for chip complexity going to survive? Stanford researchers have a solution: augment it with materials that outdo silicon where it counts. They've pinpointed two semiconductors, hafnium diselenide and zirconium diselenide, that can be made extremely thin (just three atoms thick) while self-insulating far more effectively than silicon. You could get transistors that are 10 times smaller than the smallest you get from silicon alone -- 5nm chips would seem bloated compared to what's possible with these diselenides.
