Tech
Atomic neighborhoods in semiconductors provide new avenue for designing microelectronics
Inside the microchips powering the device you’re reading this on, the atoms have a hidden order all their own. A team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and George Washington University has confirmed that atoms in semiconductors will arrange themselves in distinctive localized patterns that change the material’s electronic behavior.
The research, published in Science, may provide a foundation for designing specialized semiconductors for quantum-computing and optoelectronic devices for defense technologies.
On the atomic scale, semiconductors are crystals made of different elements arranged in repeating lattice structures. Many semiconductors are made primarily of one element with a few others added to the mix in small quantities. There aren’t enough of these trace additives to cause a repeating pattern throughout the material, but how these atoms are arranged next to their immediate neighbors has long been a mystery.
Do the rare ingredients just settle randomly among the predominant atoms during material synthesis, or do the atoms have preferred arrangements, a phenomenon seen in other materials called short-range order (SRO)? Until now, no microscopy or characterization technique could zoom in close enough, and with enough clarity, to examine tiny regions of the crystal structure and directly interpret the SRO.
“It’s an interesting scientific question because SRO dramatically changes the properties of a material. Our colleagues have predicted SRO theoretically in semiconductors, but this is the first time the individual structure of these SRO domains has been shown experimentally,” said co-lead author Andrew Minor, director of the National Center for Electron Microscopy at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry and a professor of Materials Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley.
Minor’s lab is part of the Center for Manipulation of Atomic Ordering for Manufacturing Semiconductors (µ-Atoms), a Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Frontier Research Center focused on understanding atomic ordering in semiconductors. “Our results are exciting because the property that’s being changed by this local ordering is the most important property for microelectronics, the band gap, which is what controls the electronic properties,” he said.
The breakthrough moment came when first author Lilian Vogl, who was then a postdoctoral researcher in Minor’s lab, was studying a sample of germanium containing a small amount of tin and silicon using a powerful type of electron microscopy recently pioneered by the group called 4D-STEM. The initial results were too muddled to parse the faint signals from the electrons diffracting off the tin and silicon from the strong signals off the tidily arranged germanium, so she implemented an energy-filtering device on the system to improve contrast.
When the next dataset started appearing on her monitor, she quickly realized there was a new kind of result. The faint signals were clearer, and repeating patterns emerged, indicating that the atoms have preferred order after all.
To validate her findings and learn what these patterns meant, Vogl collected more data with the energy-filtering 4D-STEM and used a pre-trained neural network to sort the diffraction images. The tool identified six recurring motifs representing particular atomic arrangements in the sample material, but the Berkeley Lab team still couldn’t determine the exact atomic structures that were generating the motifs. To interpret their experimental results, they turned to µ-Atoms collaborators at George Washington University led by co-lead author Tianshu Li, a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Li’s team generated a highly accurate and efficient machine-learning potential capable of modeling millions of atoms in the material’s structure, allowing Vogl to perform simulated 4D-STEM on different possible structural arrangements until she found matches for the motifs in the experimental data.
“It’s remarkable that modeling and experiment can work seamlessly to unravel SRO structural motifs for the first time,” said Li, whose team had previously predicted SRO and its impact and helped motivate the current study.
“Proving SRO experimentally is not an easy task, let alone identifying its structural motifs. Signals from SRO can easily be obscured by defects or inherent movement of atoms at room temperature, and until now there was no clear way to separate them. This work represents the first step toward our broader goal.”
Shunda Chen, a research scientist in Li’s group who developed the model, said, “With these models, which combine machine learning with first-principles calculations, we can replicate experimental procedures with high fidelity and pinpoint the structural motifs that would otherwise remain hidden.”
Follow-up work initiated by other µ-Atoms members at the University of Arkansas and at Sandia National Laboratories is already yielding insights into how these short range-order motifs affect the semiconductor’s electronic properties, and the scientists hope that manipulating the order to enable new types of devices and processing routes will be possible soon.
“We’re going to be able to really push the boundaries beyond current capabilities by designing semiconductors at the atomic scale,” said Vogl, who is now group leader of the Environmental & Analytical Electron Microscopy Group at the Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials.
“We are opening the door to a new era of information technology at the atomic scale, unlocking the deterministic placement of SRO motifs for tailoring of band structures that could impact a wide variety of technologies, from topological quantum materials to neuromorphic computing to optical detectors.”
More information:
Lilian M. Vogl et al, Identification of short-range ordering motifs in semiconductors, Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.adu0719
Citation:
Atomic neighborhoods in semiconductors provide new avenue for designing microelectronics (2025, September 25)
retrieved 25 September 2025
from https://techxplore.com/news/2025-09-atomic-neighborhoods-semiconductors-avenue-microelectronics.html
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After-Christmas deals are an excellent way to redeem any gift cards or cash you got for Christmas. You can purchase something you actually want, and you can do it for less money than usual. I’ve scoured the Internet for truly good after-Christmas deals on the gear that we’ve hand-tested on the WIRED Reviews team. Many of these sales will end this weekend, so keep that in mind while you’re shopping. Find all the highlights below.
For more inspiration, check out some of our recently updated buying guides, including the Best Office Chairs, the Best Cheap Phones, and the Best Space Heaters.
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Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
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Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
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The most immediately striking difference is that Hyperkin’s product swaps the typical Xbox approach of asymmetric thumbsticks for the PlayStation’s horizontal layout. It also separates the D-pad (it’s one piece inside the pad, but splits its cardinal directions so each appears to be its own button), while the ABXY face buttons are spaced slightly further apart. Where the DualSense’s touchpad would sit, we have the Xbox home, menu, view, and share buttons, all blended in rather smartly. An LED ring around the home button just about echoes the lights running the periphery of the DualSense’s touchpad, although it’s really more of an inversion of the regular Xbox controller, where the home button itself lights up.
The Competitor’s thumbsticks come equipped with thumbcaps that mirror the PS5’s, an outer ring with a convex central point, but a pair of Xbox-standard concave caps are included. These easily pop on and off, and can be mixed and matched, if you were so (strangely) inclined.
There are two areas where this departs from both the standard Xbox and PlayStation controllers in terms of inputs. The first is the presence of two programmable rear buttons, M1 and M2. By default, these duplicate the input of the A and B buttons, but holding down the Mode button between them lets you remap them. There are also physical button locks to prevent their use entirely. The other is that while the Competitor boasts a 3.5-mm headphone jack like Microsoft’s official pad, it adds a built-in audio mute button, hidden in the black between the thumbsticks—a nice little upgrade.
Oddly Familiar
In use, the Competitor feels … well, a lot like a PS5 pad. The slightly wider grip fits in the hand comfortably, all inputs are accessible, and those symmetrical thumbsticks sit nicely in reach for all but the smallest hands. A microtextured underside provides a solid grip that, when coupled with its 232-gram weight, makes the Competitor feel particularly suited to longer play periods. It’s all very familiar if you’re already a multiformat gamer, to the extent that it sometimes slightly threw my muscle memory off, reaching a thumb out to do a PlayStation touchpad function and finding only the Xbox system buttons.
Photograph: Matt Kamen
When US president Donald Trump launched his own meme cryptocurrency on January 17, days before his return to the White House, I was halfway up a Swiss alp, attending a crypto conference in the town of St. Moritz.
Memecoins, which typically have no purpose beyond financial speculation, were having a moment. The previous year, millions of new memecoins had flooded the market; a few, like Fartcoin, had rocketed to billion-dollar valuations. Pump.Fun, a platform for launching and trading memecoins, had become one of the fastest-growing crypto launchpad businesses ever. Now, the soon-to-be president was getting in on the act.
Over lunch on the second day of the conference, beneath the ornate stucco ceiling and golden chandeliers of the venue’s dining hall, I located a table designated for a conversation about memecoins. Whereas other tables were half full, the memecoin workshop was oversubscribed; latecomers pulled up chairs to create two full rows.
The discussion was led by Nagendra Bharatula, founder of investment firm G-20 Group. Bharatula had recently coauthored a paper arguing that memecoins, despite their juvenile spirit, had a place in professional investors’ portfolios. In the six months prior, a basket of 25 “bluechip memecoins”—an oxymoron if ever there was one—had outperformed bitcoin by 150 percent, he pointed out. Some of the attendees murmured their approval.
Since then, the shine has come off the memecoin market. The paper value of Trump’s coin, which climbed to a peak of $14 billion two days after its launch, has cratered to roughly $1 billion. Hundreds of thousands of small investors lost their shirts. Pump.Fun’s daily revenue, a proxy for the overall appetite for memecoin trading, is barely more than a tenth of what it was in January. The memecoin gold rush has spawned a raft of litigation.
Next up: the stablecoin. If memecoins are symbolic of reckless abandon and unflinching profiteering in cryptoland, stablecoins are a symbol of the industry’s search for purpose and respectability. Designed to hold a steady $1 valuation, stablecoins are pitched by proponents as a faster and cheaper way to make everyday payments and international money transfers.
In a year in which the US has declared itself open for crypto business, where previously crypto firms feared regulatory backlash under the Biden administration, stablecoins have supplanted memecoins as the coin à la mode—and punctured the mainstream.
Though stablecoins have been around since 2014, they have predominantly been used by crypto traders as a safe harbor during bouts of market volatility, not by regular people. The concept has also faced resistance from regulators skeptical of a new form of money; Diem, a stablecoin venture incubated at Meta, famously shuttered in 2022 in the face of broad-based opposition.
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