Scientists Create World's Smallest High-Performance Chip

Scientists in China just shattered a major roadblock in making electronics smaller and more powerful. A team at Nanjing University created the world's smallest high-performance transistor, achieving what the industry calls the "1 nanometer node," a milestone many experts thought was still out of reach.

The breakthrough centers on a clever solution to a stubborn problem. As computer chips shrink, the tiny electrical connections become harder to attach, like trying to solder wires onto a grain of sand. This contact resistance issue has been the biggest obstacle to making electronics smaller, even more than the circuits themselves.

The research team, led by Xinran Wang, grew ultra-small contacts made of crystalline antimony directly onto a super-thin semiconductor called molybdenum disulfide. They used a technique called molecular beam epitaxy, which places atoms one by one with incredible precision in an ultra-high vacuum. Think of it like 3D printing, but at the atomic level.

The results exceeded expectations. Their contacts maintained ultra-low resistance even at just 18 nanometers long, while traditional methods start failing at 60 nanometers. The transistors they created have a contacted gate pitch below 40 nanometers, making them potentially the smallest high-performance devices ever demonstrated.

What makes this especially exciting is the material itself. These two-dimensional semiconductors are incredibly thin and resist performance problems that plague traditional silicon as it shrinks. Until now, nobody could prove these materials would actually work at such tiny scales outside of theory.

The Ripple Effect spreads far beyond the lab. IMEC, a leading semiconductor research organization, just released its 2025 device roadmap naming 2D semiconductors as the future of transistor scaling. This team's work transforms that distant vision into demonstrated reality, potentially accelerating the timeline by years.

Your smartphone already contains billions of transistors packed onto chips smaller than your fingernail. This breakthrough means that miniaturization can continue, leading to devices that are faster, more energy-efficient, and more powerful while using less battery. It could enable everything from longer-lasting smartphones to more capable medical devices to advances in artificial intelligence.

Co-first author Weisheng Li noted their method produces antimony crystals with grain sizes two orders of magnitude larger than conventional techniques, meaning far better quality and reliability. Other research teams worldwide can now build on this foundation, opening new possibilities nobody thought were available yet.

The gap between laboratory discovery and factory production just got a lot smaller.