As silicon chips approach the limits of their physical scale, scientists are pioneering ultra-thin designs to boost computational performance.

A Chinese research team has developed a semiconductor microprocessor just a few atomic layers thick. The chip, WUJI, is a 32-bit RISC-V processor based on two-dimensional semiconductors.

RISC-V is an architecture known for being free and open-source, and for its design flexibility and low power consumption.

The microprocessor has 5,900 transistors and a complete standard cell library containing 25 types of logic units, and can perform addition and subtraction operations on up to 4.2 billion data points, allowing for the programming of up to 1 billion instructions, according to Zhou Peng at Fudan University.

The 2D logic circuits have been designed in alignment with advances in silicon integrated circuits, as has an optimized process flow, according to the study, the details of which were published in Nature this week.

The research team leveraged innovative AI algorithms to enable precise control from material-growth to integration processes, said Zhou, the paper's corresponding author.

The team's approach to manufacturing and design has successfully tackled the major challenges of wafer-scale integration for 2D circuits, resulting in a groundbreaking microprocessor prototype that demonstrates the vast potential of 2D integrated-circuit technology beyond the standard silicon, according to the researchers.