At Peking University, a group of Chinese scientists may have just turned the computing industry up on its head.

With a slender sheet of lab-grown bismuth and an architecture unlike anything inside today’s silicon chips, they’ve built what they call the world’s fastest and most efficient transistor. Not only does it outperform the best processors made by Intel and TSMC, but it also uses less energy doing so. And most important of all, there’s no trace of silicon involved.

This two-dimensional, silicon-free transistor represents a radical rethinking of what chips can be and how they can be made.

“If chip innovations based on existing materials are considered a ‘short cut’, then our development of 2D material-based transistors is akin to ‘changing lanes’,” Hailin Peng, professor of chemistry at Peking University and the study’s lead author, told SCMP.

From “fins” to bridges

To understand what’s so groundbreaking about this transistor, it helps to first picture what’s being replaced.

Since the early 1990s, transistors — the tiny switches that drive everything from smartphones to supercomputers — have largely depended on silicon and a design known as the Fin Field-Effect Transistor, or FinFET. These resemble tiny skyscrapers, standing vertically on chips to allow better control of current flow at nanoscale dimensions.

But FinFETs are running out of space — literally. As chips shrink to just a few nanometers, engineers are hitting hard physical limits. Below 3 nanometers, performance gains become harder and power consumption rises. Something has to give.

So, Peng’s team decided not to shrink the old design any further. They scrapped it altogether.

Their new transistor uses a gate-all-around field-effect transistor (GAAFET) structure. Instead of wrapping the gate around three sides of the transistor’s channel like FinFETs do, a GAAFET encircles it on all four. This offers better control of the current and drastically cuts down on wasted energy.

But that’s not new. The real innovation lies in what the transistor is made of.

The bismuth advantage

Rather than silicon, the Peking University team built their transistor using bismuth oxyselenide (Bi₂O₂Se) for the channel, and bismuth selenite oxide (Bi₂SeO₅) as the gate material.

These materials are part of a class known as two-dimensional semiconductors — atomically thin sheets with exceptional electrical properties. Bismuth oxyselenide, in particular, offers something silicon struggles with at ultra-small sizes: speed.

Electrons move through it faster, even when packed into tiny spaces. It also has a higher dielectric constant, meaning it can hold and control electric charge more efficiently. That makes for faster switching, reduced energy loss, and — very importantly — a lower chance of overheating.

“This reduces electron scattering and current loss, allowing electrons to flow with almost no resistance, akin to water moving through a smooth pipe,” Peng explained.

The interface between these materials is also smoother than that of common semiconductor-oxide combinations used in industry today. That means fewer defects and less electrical noise.

All of this adds up to stunning results. According to the team, their transistor can run 40% faster than today’s most advanced 3-nanometer silicon chips — and it does so while using 10% less energy.

A shift born of necessity

There’s a geopolitical current flowing beneath this research.

Due to ongoing U.S.-led export restrictions, Chinese firms have been blocked from buying the latest silicon chip-making equipment. The most advanced lithography machines, those that can manufacture 3-nanometer chips, are made by a handful of companies in the West.

By creating a transistor that doesn’t rely on silicon — and which can be fabricated using existing tools in China — Peng’s team may have found a way around those sanctions.

“While this path is born out of necessity due to current sanctions, it also forces researchers to find solutions from fresh perspectives,” Peng said.

Despite the impressive performance in the lab, big questions remain.

Can these transistors be manufactured at scale? Will they survive the heat and stress of real-world computing? And how long will it take for the technology to reach consumer devices?

Peng’s team says they’re already working on scaling up production. Early prototypes of logic units built with the transistor showed ultra-low operating voltages and high voltage gain — two promising signs for integration into actual circuits. The fact that they used existing fabrication platforms also hints that the barrier to mass production may not be as high as with other experimental technologies.

“This work demonstrates that 2D GAAFETs do exhibit comparable performance and energy efficiency to commercial silicon-based transistors,” the researchers wrote, “making them a promising candidate for the next technology node.”

But turning laboratory breakthroughs into commercial chips typically takes years — sometimes decades. It’s one thing to design a single transistor. It’s quite another to integrate billions of them onto a reliable, manufacturable chip.

Still, if successful, this breakthrough could give China a new technological foundation. And more broadly, it signals that the semiconductor race may no longer be just about who can make smaller silicon but who can think beyond it.

The findings were reported in the journal Nature Materials.