Dr. 9x talked about the opportunity to develop new semiconductor materials in Vietnam

Having graduated from Ho Chi Minh City University of Natural Sciences, a graduate student at Homg King City University, and then a postdoctoral researcher at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Dr. Thi Quoc Huy had many opportunities to learn and research about 2D materials. Realizing that this is not just a research direction in the laboratory but has become part of the technology race between large semiconductor corporations such as Samsung, TSMC and many research centers in the US, Korea, China, and Europe, he rekindled the dream of independently creating this material.

Deciding to return, in 2024, he accepted the position of researcher at the Institute of Advanced Technology (IAT) - Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology (VAST). He began building a research team at IAT with the goal of training Vietnamese students in the field of materials to become researchers capable of developing advanced materials projects.

Grasping techniques equivalent to what the world's 2D materials community is doing, "what I think about is how to contribute to the development of the domestic field and help the generation of students in Vietnam have the opportunity to access it sooner," Dr. Huy said.

In the field of traditional semiconductors, Vietnam is considered by experts to be far behind compared to countries with developed chip industries. However, the world's semiconductor industry, developed based on Moore's Law - continuously shrinking transistor size to increase chip performance - is gradually reaching its physical limit. Earlier this year, "giant" TSMC began mass production of 2 nm chips. Although the cost per wafer has increased by about 50% compared to the 3 nm generation, component performance has only increased by 10-15%.

With shaped bulk materials like silicon, as the transistor size gets smaller, stability decreases. On the other hand, increased transistor density also increases electron scattering, making the device hotter and consuming more energy. "This is one of the biggest bottlenecks in the semiconductor industry," Dr. Huy said, adding that businesses in this field are increasingly approaching the limits of 'compact' designs based on bulk materials. "If we want to develop, we must change the roots of materials. This is also the reason the world is looking to 2D materials."

The importance of 2D materials was recognized by the world very early. In 2010, two scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on graphene, just 6 years after this material was successfully separated from graphite. This is a very short period of time for a Nobel Prize in basic science, showing that the scientific community saw the potential of materials early.

Up to now, the method of synthesizing and manipulating this material is different from when it was first discovered more than 20 years ago. "The simplest method is to separate graphene, which is carbon atoms arranged on a flat surface, from graphite. However, this only yields very small pieces of material, in powder form. Today's method of synthesis by chemical vapor deposition, or CVD, creates a single-layer graphene film on a surface," Dr. Huy said.

CVD has been widely used in the semiconductor industry to coat thin layers of material on chip surfaces and has also been deployed by some domestic groups to fabricate graphene. However, according to Dr. Huy, the difference between Vietnam's two-dimensional materials technology capacity and the world's currently lies in the level of control. "Creating graphene is not too difficult. But creating a high-quality, uniform, two-dimensional material that has few defects and can be used for components is another story," he said.

Imagine a material so thin that just 1 gram of graphene covers an area the size of a football field. How can you "hold" such an ultra-thin material, or evaluate the surface quality at the atomic level? This is also the problem that brought Dr. Huy and his research team important publications in Nano Letters, Advanced Materials in 2023 and Nature Materials in 2025.

Opportunity for Vietnam

Two-dimensional materials such as graphene, carbon nitride and transition metal dichalcogenides, commonly known as TMDs, are atomically thick, about a few tenths of a nanometer, about a million times thinner than the diameter of a human hair. Thanks to their ultra-thin structure and special mechanical, electrical, and optical properties, they are considered potential candidates for ultra-sensitive sensors, new generation transistors, optoelectronic components, power devices, and high-performance battery systems. For example, graphene has very high electrical and thermal conductivity, promising to help reduce resistance, better heat dissipation and pave the way for thinner and lighter component structures.

Typically, to transfer an ultrathin layer of graphene from a growth surface to another substrate, researchers coat the graphene with a layer of polymer that acts as a support. Once transferred, the polymer layer is washed with solvents or chemicals. However, this process often leaves impurities on the surface, reducing the inherently sensitive properties of the two-dimensional material.

"From the desire to find a cleaner solution, with less impact on the material, we tried a very simple idea: use freezing water to hold the material layer, then dry so that the ice layer disappears after completing the operation," Dr. Huy said about the work announced in 2023. This method was later successfully registered for a patent in the US and was recognized as one of the excellent inventions at the 2023 Asia Regional Exhibition of Creativity and Invention. Geneva International Invention Exhibition in Switzerland in 2024.

The solution once perfected seemed simple, he said, but in reality, successful testing required thousands of iterations over many months. "There is no most memorable failed attempt, because 99% of attempts are failures, publishable results are only the remaining 1%. This is also the first lesson my instructor told me when I started pursuing this field," he shared.

The story is similar to the discovery published in Nature Materials in 2025, one of the leading journals in basic science. In this paper, the research team found a mechanism to improve the durability of TMDs, a 2D material that can turn current on and off better than graphene and is considered a potential candidate for micro-transistors and the next generation of chips after silicon.

By stacking two layers of material at a 30-degree rotation, the team created a structure that is more resistant to crack propagation. The result, determined "simply" by testing through two layers of material, is an approximately two-fold increase in the material's strength while retaining the inherent stiffness of the two-dimensional material.

According to Dr. Huy, new generations of materials are in the formation stage, so Vietnam still has the opportunity to participate early. To develop 2D materials, Vietnam needs to build interdisciplinary research groups, connecting materials manufacturing, structural analysis, property measurement and application development.

At IAT, he said the team has perfected a CVD system for testing graphene fabrication. Currently, the price of a commercial graphene sheet about 2.5 cm in size can be more than 200 USD. "As a first step, we want to simplify the manufacturing process and reduce costs by producing domestically. Then seek cooperation with research groups with expertise in materials applications, as well as businesses and corporations oriented toward developing materials technology," he said.

However, a limitation in Vietnam, when a 2D material membrane has been synthesized at the atomic scale, is that there is not enough equipment to evaluate and survey the material. Although the initial facilities cannot compare with the international laboratories he has worked in, Dr. Huy sees a long-term opportunity. "With the generation of chips after silicon, we have the opportunity to master a very important upstream stage, which is materials. Regarding new materials, we are not too far behind the world and if invested in the right direction, developing this capacity is completely within Vietnam's ability," he said.

Nam Nguyen