Engineers at the University of Utah discovered a new kind of flat semiconducting material made of tin monoxide that is only one-atom thick, allowing electrical charges to pass through it faster than silicon or other 3D materials.

Charges traveling through conventional electronic devices bounce around in all directions when traveling through transistors and other components consisting of layers of silicon on a glass substrate. Engineers have only recently begun to work with 2D materials like graphene, molybdenum disulfide and borophene, which force electrons to "only move in one layer so it's much faster," says professor Ashutosh Tiwari, who led the research.

Tiwari says the new material fills an important gap in speeding up electronics because, unlike graphene and other near atom-thin materials, it allows both negative electrons and positive charges – or "holes" – to move through it. This has led the team to describe the material as the first stable P-type 2D semiconductor material in existence.

"Now we have everything," he says. "Now things will move forward much more quickly."