Thread by @wmhuo168

China just ended the Silicon Age. CMOS is dead. And the West still doesn’t know it. (1/13)

science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

The world was busy tracking Nvidia’s market cap. Meanwhile, Chinese scientists quietly created a stoichiometrically perfect InSe wafer. The implications are fatal for ASML, TSMC, and everything downstream. (2/13)

Let’s break it down. CMOS stands for Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor. It is the foundational logic of every modern chip built on silicon. Faster chips meant smaller nodes. That’s what gave ASML a monopoly over EUV lithography. (3/13)

But CMOS has physical limits. Leakage, heat, quantum tunneling. Silicon just can’t scale past a point. So Moore’s Law stalled. The West bet everything on packaging tricks and brute-force GPU scaling. China didn’t. (4/13)

China built a new wafer. Not a tweak, not a workaround. A completely new crystal material: indium selenide, or InSe. Two atoms thick. Perfectly flat. No dangling bonds. No grain boundaries. And they made it at scale. (5/13)

Here’s why this is bigger than EUV. InSe allows vertical stacking of transistors without heat leakage. Its 2D nature means zero surface traps and quantum-level carrier mobility. You can build chips like skyscrapers, not suburbs. (6/13)

The killer detail: Chinese researchers mastered the stoichiometry. That means atomic-level perfection. No variance in indium to selenium ratios. The entire wafer grows under sealed indium vapor that locks in a stable liquid phase. (7/13)

This solves the main problem in 2D semiconductors. You can’t mass-produce something that warps or collapses under heat. China figured out how to stabilize growth and etch transistor arrays directly onto the new crystal. (8/13)

Let this sink in. The West built fabs around one material: silicon. All the lithography, doping, etching, and process nodes are built around that one assumption. China just flipped the table. (9/13)

No more needing ASML’s $200M photolithography gear. No more dancing with TSMC in Taiwan. This is a new stack. China owns the IP. China owns the process. And it’s open-ended. (10/13)

CMOS was the ceiling. InSe is the floor of the next skyscraper. This is not another node race. It’s a civilizational fork in semiconductor history. (11/13)

Don't bother looking for it on Bloomberg. You won't find it. But you just lived through the moment silicon was surpassed. You just witnessed history. (12/13)

Let me know if you want a separate thread on how InSe beats silicon in every dimension. Or why this kills ASML’s entire reason for existing. (13/13)