NTU and TSMC Collaborate to Develop 2D Atomic Layer Materials for Next-generation Semiconductor Devices, with Findings Published in Nature Communications

2025/4/23

A research team led by Distinguished Professor Dr. Chun-Wei CHEN of Materials Science at NTU, in collaboration with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Ltd. (TSMC), has made a significant breakthrough in the development of next-generation 2D atomic layer materials for semiconductor devices. The team successfully achieved 2-inch monolayer and centimeter-scale bilayer WSe2 (tungsten diselenide) films and fabricated them into high-performance transistors. This research was recently published in Nature Communications.

The development of semiconductor devices has long been guided by Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors accommodated in an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years while maintaining relatively constant costs. Driven by Moore's Law, transistor performance in silicon-based integrated circuits (ICs) continues to improve. However, as channel dimensions shrink to the sub-nanometer scale, the physical limits of device operation are being approached. The resulting short channel effect, in particular, remains a key concern.

2D materials, with atomic thicknesses of less than 1 nm, are considered highly promising as next-generation semiconductor materials and may effectively address this issue. However, the growth of these materials—especially large-scale, high-quality 2D materials—remains in the early stages of development. Among the most widely studied emerging 2D materials are transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), primarily composed of molybdenum (Mo) and tungsten (W), combined with sulfur (S) and selenium (Se) from the chalcogenide group, and numerous studies have focused on the n-type MoS2, which has shown good electron transport. However, one of the key challenges currently hindering breakthroughs is the large-scale growth of p-type hole transport materials.

This research primarily addresses the bottleneck in growing large-area 2D material of WSe2. A research team from NTU and TSMC has developed large-area monolayer and bilayer WSe2 films with low defect densities, enabling the fabrication of high-performance p-type transistors. They also found that bilayer WSe2 transistors exhibit higher hole/electron mobilities, demonstrating significant development potential. The research findings are of great significance for future research on 2D materials in next-generation semiconductors.

This collaborative research was conducted by a team from NTU, including Professor Chun-Wei CHEN of Materials Science, Professor Ya-Ping CHIU of Physics, and Dr. Yu-Ming CHANG, Researcher at the NTU Center for Condensed Matter Sciences , along with a TSMC research team. The team acknowledges support from the National Science and Technology Council's Angstrom Semiconductor Initiative , NTU Center of Atomic Initiative for New Materials (AI-MAT) —subsidized by the Ministry of Education's Higher Education Sprout Project—and the TSMC Joint Development Project (JDP).

To access the full research article, please visit https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-57986-1.