China Built a Chip 100 Million Times Faster — Using a Metal It Controls

By Quantum Silk Route

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#china #semiconductor #chipwar A chip that finishes a search before light can cross it — and the metal that makes it work is one China largely controls. The full story behind the Nature Nanotechnology paper nobody read closely. Researchers at the University of Hong Kong, Fudan University, and the National University of Singapore have built an analogue content-addressable memory using atomically thin molybdenum disulfide flash cells with antimony contacts. The device needs just two transistors per cell instead of the standard sixteen, completes a search in 36 picoseconds, consumes under 0.1 femtojoules per search per cell, and ran a machine learning classification task roughly 100 million times faster than a standard CPU. But the detail buried in the methods section is the geopolitical one. The contact electrode is antimony — a critical mineral China placed under export control in August 2024, banned outright to the United States in December 2024, and released only under a temporary

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