ASML, TSMC and Imec successfully fabricate 2D material transistors

At this week’s VLSI 2026 IC and technology conference in Hawaii, Imec Semiconductor Research Center (Belgium), photolithography equipment manufacturer ASML (Netherlands) and chipmaker TSMC (Taiwan) announced commercial manufacturing processes for transistors using 2D materials.

The three giants said they had successfully researched and manufactured both nFET and pFET complementary transistors on the same standard 300 mm diameter wafer, with the distance between the gate poles reaching an ultra-small level of 50 nm. This is the first time a complementary 2D transistor has been achieved at this size using a process compatible with today’s industrial chip fabs.

Theo Tom’s HardwareFor more than 50 years, the global chip industry has operated according to Moore’s Law, trying to shrink the size of transistors to cram more into microprocessors, helping computers operate faster, cheaper and save more electricity. However, silicon – the foundation material of modern processor chips – is reaching its physical limits. When a transistor is too small, current begins to leak through the separation barriers, wasting energy, generating heat and reducing device performance. The chip industry has delayed this limit with FinFET or Gate-All-Around (GAA) architectures, but experts believe that a new material is needed to continue the chip miniaturization path.

2D materials are one of the bright candidates. Unlike traditional 3D materials, 2D materials are only a few atomic layers thick. Thanks to their absolute thinness, they help control the current flowing through the transistor much better, eliminating power leakage. The biggest challenge over the years has been bringing 2D materials from the lab to the factory environment. Creating a few test chips is very different from producing billions of transistors on large wafers with a low error rate.

The breakthrough of the Imec, ASML and TSMC alliance is to optimize that process. By combining ASML’s EUV photolithography technology with an inverted thin-film transistor architecture, they narrowed the channel length to 28 nm. As a result, the rate of stable operating transistors reaches 94% on the entire 300 mm wafer.

This success resonates thanks to the combination of three major units in the global semiconductor supply chain. In particular, Imec does in-depth research, ASML provides exclusive production equipment and TSMC has the best large-scale production capacity today.

ASML’s participation ensures that the new 2D transistor can be fabricated using existing EUV photolithography machines. Big chip companies will not have to rebuild super factories worth tens of billions of dollars just to chase new technology. Meanwhile, the presence of TSMC, a chip foundry for Apple, Nvidia, AMD…, helps confirm that the technology has great commercial potential in reality, not just on paper.

The explosion of artificial intelligence is causing data centers to consume huge amounts of electricity. On the user side, AI features running directly on the device also require powerful chips and large batteries. 2D material transistors are expected to be the key to solving the problem. With the ability to operate at high performance but consume little energy, this technology promises to bring smartphones with outstanding battery life, thin and light laptops without fans, and AI supercomputer systems that process data at the speed of light.

However, the commercialization of 2D chips is unlikely to take place in the next few years. The path from process optimization to mass production in the semiconductor industry often takes a decade. Experts predict that the first commercial applications of 2D material chips will appear as early as the 2030s, starting with specialized high-performance computing systems before spreading to popular mobile devices.