Post-silicon era gets closer as industry giants crack the 2D transistor scaling bottleneck with breakthrough tech — imec, ASML, and TSMC fab complementary 2D-material transistors at 50nm pitch on a 300mm wafer

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Imec, ASML, and TSMC have integrated both n-type and p-type transistors with atomically thin 2D channels on a single 300mm wafer at a 50nm contacted poly pitch, the tightest pitch demonstrated to date for complementary 2D devices and one that lands within range of leading-edge silicon.

The trio presented the work this week at the IEEE/JSAP Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits, using a single EUV exposure to print channel lengths as short as 28nm. Imec reported that 94% of the integrated transistors switched correctly, with an on/off current ratio above 100,000. The n-channel devices use molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂), while the p-channel devices use tungsten diselenide (WSe₂) or tungsten disulfide (WS₂).

2D transition metal dichalcogenides have been studied for more than a decade — imec has been fabricating MoS₂ test transistor s since the late 2010s — so while it’s not a new material breakthrough, the result is a solid milestone in terms of integration and scaling. What’s changed with this work is that both transistor polarities were built together on a standard 300mm process flow, rather than as isolated single devices patterned with coarser lithography.

The demonstrated transistors reached active widths down to 75nm and an equivalent oxide thickness near 2nm. Both polarities turned fully off at zero gate voltage, and imec said the WSe₂ p-channel devices performed close to the best lab-scale results reported so far, narrowing the gap on the historically weaker p-type side of 2D CMOS. For perspective on the pitch, 50nm is tighter than the 54nm contacted gate pitch of Intel's 10nm-class node.

Contact resistance has been the dominant obstacle to scaling 2D transistors because an atomically thin channel carries comparatively little current, and the junction between the metal contact and the 2D film tends to throttle whatever the channel can deliver, partly because the metal pins the semiconductor's Fermi level and raises the Schottky barrier that carriers must cross. Lab devices have compensated by keeping large contact areas, which in turn blocks the pitch scaling that makes the transistors worth pursuing in the first place.

To break that trade-off, the consortium inverted the usual build order: rather than depositing metal onto the fragile film after the channel is in place, the team patterned tungsten-filled contact trenches first and transferred the 2D channel on top, with the gate deposited over it. Imec calls this a “reverse” thin-film-transistor flow, and credits the resulting bottom-contact geometry for the clean off-state behavior, in which both polarities stop conducting at zero gate voltage.

The 28nm channels and 50nm pitch were printed with one EUV exposure, well inside the resolution of standard 0.33-NA EUV scanners. ASML’s High-NA EUV work with imec targets far tighter pitches that would otherwise demand multi-patterning, but the 50nm pitch here needs neither High-NA tooling nor multiple exposures. ASML credited EUV's resolution for shrinking 2D channel lengths that earlier 300mm demonstrations had left large because they relied on older lithography.

Imec isn’t alone here, with Intel having run its own 300mm 2D-material program with the company, and Samsung having demonstrated wafer-scale growth of single-crystal MoS₂. University groups have pushed monolayer MoS₂transistors to gate pitches near the 1nm-node, but what sets imec’s work apart here is the combination of complementary n- and p-type integration, EUV single-patterning, and a node-relevant pitch on full 300mm tooling at once.

Imec's long-range roadmap has placed 2D atomic channels beyond 2030, and IEEE Spectrum has reported that imec expects CFETs around 2033 and a switch to 2D-semiconductor channels closer to 2041, while the IRDS industry roadmap pencils in 2D channels as early as 2034 at the 0.7nm node, a timeline that sits well beyond today's silicon. TSMC only began volume production of its first gate-all-around node, N2, late last year, and the CFET that stacks n-type over p-type transistors is the next step before 2D channels become relevant to logic chips.

And while the demonstration is impressive, several challenges still separate it from a production process. First, the integration is quasi-CMOS: the n- and p-type materials are placed side by side by transferring films onto the wafer, not grown together in a single monolithic flow, and wafer-scale, residue-free transfer at production throughput remains unsolved. Beyond that, fab-compatible low-resistance contacts, controllable doping, and long-term reliability data all need to be addressed.

Dr. Min Cao, vice president and chief technology officer at TSMC, described the collaboration's aim as de-risking the lab-to-fab transition for novel channel materials. On the timelines imec and the IRDS have published, that transition is a 2030s problem at the earliest, and the first production role for 2D channels is likely to be modest back-end or wafer-backside devices, not high-performance logic. The engineering shown this week, however, narrows the work to be done down to manufacturing problems rather than questions about whether the devices can be built at pitch at all.