A Claim That TSMC Has a 1nm Process Hits the Headlines

Less than two weeks after IBM announced their 2-nanometer CMOS technology, UK website Verdict picked up on a paper published in Nature and somehow morphed that into a claim that TSMC had made breakthrough in 1-nm technology development, and that was subsequently circulated by much of the tech press that I follow (search “TSMC & 1nm”!). The Verdict headline was “TSMC trumps IBM’s “2nm” chip tech hyperbole with “1nm” claim”, referring to a Nature publication “Ultralow contact resistance between semimetal and monolayer semiconductors”[1]. The essence of the paper is the use of bismuth (Bi) to provide contact to a molybdenum disulphide (MoS2) monolayer transistor, achieving a claimed record low contact resistance of 123 Ω µm, and a record high on-state current density of 1,135 µA/µm.