In a significant advance in chip innovation, Chinese scientists have designed a 32-bit RISC-V processor using molybdenum disulfide, a material only slightly thicker than an atom.
Touting the design as the world’s most complex two-dimensional (2D) microprocessor, the announcement suggests a future in which this 2D design could power chips in edge sensors and other low-power scenarios.
Silicon, of course, dominates the semiconductor sector, yet this widely used material is starting to reach the limit of how much it can be miniaturized. As a result, 2D materials such molybdenum disulphide and tungsten diselenide—materials whose thickness is a mere one atom—are finding more interest among researchers.
In an article in Nature, the Chinese researchers detailed how they used these ultra-thin materials to build the processor. Dubbed RV32-WUJI, the design builds on earlier work by scientists who learned how to create wafer-thin sheets of molybdenum disulfide on a sapphire substrate.
The design however has its limitations. First, it’s quite slow: It can only attain kilohertz clock speeds, meaning its instructions are executed at a frequency measured in thousands of cycles per second instead of millions or billions. For perspective, the NVIDIA Blackwell GB200 processor can execute up to 20 quadrillion calculations per second. Additionally, the team’s design can only add single bits of data at a time. (Today’s commonly used 64-bit CPUs can, as their name suggests, handle 64 bits of data at a time.).
However, despite the sluggish speed, the team’s design includes 5900 transistors, which provide enough compute power to execute the full RISC-V 32-bit instruction set. As they wrote: “We describe a reduced instruction set computing architecture (RISC-V) microprocessor capable of executing standard 32-bit instructions on 5,900 MoS2 transistors and a complete standard cell library based on 2D semiconductor technology.”
This impressive feat required the researchers to perform extensive experimentation, using machine learning (ML), to find a combination of materials and signal wiring that enabled each of these nearly 6,000 transistors to perform as needed. To design circuitry that could transit signal at this level of extreme miniaturization, the team tested numerous logic gates, finding 18 functional gates to build the processor.
As they explained: “Our combined manufacturing and design methodology has overcome the significant challenges associated with wafer-scale integration of 2D circuits and enabled a pioneering prototype of an MoS2 [the technical acronym for Molybdenum disulfide] microprocessor that exemplifies the potential of 2D integrated-circuit technology beyond silicon.”
That this design is built as a RISC-V processor has larger implications for the brewing trade war created by the recently announced tariffs. The RISC-V chip technology uses modular, open source, extensible architecture that allows developers to design and market microprocessors without license fees, making it ideal for researchers. It’s used in everything from small devices to supercomputers. The RISC-V server chip can also support open-source AI models like DeepSeek.
RISC-V plays a central role in the Chinese tech sector for being seen as a way to develop technology without involvement from Western tech vendors. No foreign power can sanction or restrict the RISC-V design. The Chinese government is vigorously supporting RISC-V solutions with funding and other incentives for research projects, with vendors like Tencent and Alibaba developing RISC-V products.
