It's slow and inefficient, but the semiconductor is only one molecule thick.
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…