I've heard a lot about graphene and carbon nanotubes, but today was my first visit to the "molybdenum disulfide" Wikipedia entry. Researchers at Tu Wien in Austria have developed a microprocessor that uses 2D molybdenum disulfide as the semiconductor (via KurzweilAI).
"2D" materials are materials built out of a thin layer of atoms — sometimes they’re a single atom thick. There are a bunch of reasons this is a good idea for electronics: a chip that thin can be transparent, flexible, and use less power than a traditional silicon chip. Of course, first you have to figure out how to build one.
The 0.6mm² chip built by the Tu Wien team is a one-bit microprocessor with 115 transistors. It's not really Crysis-ready hardware, but...
