First Graphene Transistor

An anonymous reader writes "UK researchers are announcing the first ever workable transistor made of graphene — that's one layer of carbon atoms. It's thinner and smaller than a silicon transistor can ever be, and it works at room temperature. When silicon electronics are dead, this is what many speculate is going to take over. There's slight controversy as they decided to announce their results via a review article, rather than wait for their (submitted) peer review paper to come out."

Comments

Re:practical?

[MindKata]

I really hope the technology works but I have doubts about its reliability outside the lab.

Its one thing getting one transistor working in ideal conditions ... its another to build a circuit with at least a billion of these transistors (which it will need, if it is to compete with Silicon for Computer parts). Although that said, as these transistors will be so fast, there could be more practical high frequency analogue applications.

I think background radiation will be one of its main reasons it will fail for a CPU and RAM. With a structure 1 atom thick there is no room for failure. Either an atom exists or it doesn't. Knock an atom out of place then it fails. With a conventional transistor as its bulk material all that happens is it degrades its performance but it can take it (most of the time).

When I first started to read the article I thought it sounded a bit like the Ballistic transistor. Its interesting the Wiki also mentions Graphene as a way to form Ballistic transistors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_transistor

I really hope it works as it could create incredible computers ... But even analogue applications could be very interesting (like maybe even operating in the Terra Hz range :)