‘Historic’: Chinese team makes world’s first 2D industrial chip for military use

Chinese scientists have made a “historic leap” in developing a chip that can cope with extreme levels of radiation.

The Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chip has a wide range of potential uses, including satellite command and control systems, spaceborne computers and weapons systems.

Its hardware can be reconfigured after manufacturing to perform a wide variety of specific tasks.

This flexibility makes FPGAs useful for custom computing applications and electronic systems that may need to be updated during use.

National Science Review, the domestic journal that published the latest research, said the development marked a “historic leap for 2D semiconductors from simple circuits to complex systems”.

It added that the chip exhibited strong radiation tolerance, making it “suitable for strategic fields such as aerospace, military systems, and high-reliability computing”.

The research team, led by Professors Zhou Peng and Bao Wenzhong from Fudan University, developed an FPGA based on molybdenum disulfide – a compound that has a greater resistance to radiation than conventional silicon-based circuits.