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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."
No problem...that just means somebody else has built the same thing.
Thank you and goodnight! :)
Wow, silicon will never match that! Now I don't have to work in this darn freon chamber all day.
I don't really see it as that controversial. If their research doesn't hold up under peer-review it's their loss, although I am very surprised that Nature is publishing this without it being reviewed. Let's hope it doesn't turn out to be a clone (pardon the pun) of what happened in the faked S. Korean cloning research.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
graphene transistors need to be able to be mass-produced, scalable and just as reliable as alternatives [silicon, quantum computers etc.] most importantly, relatively easy to make- [why diamonds though semiconductive are by no means replacing silicon] it will be interesting to see how this competes in the future though.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
A use for Folgers.
oh, wait; GRAPHene... oops.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
I think if this is to be used in consumer products, market forces will tell them how long they have. Big leaps often come in short time spans. 13 years is a long time and it seems the longer we wait for something to come to market, the more likely it seems to be vapour ware. If this is pure research, they can take their time (and pure research is a good thing too).
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
When silicon electronics are dead, this is what many speculate is going to take over.
One of the disadvantages of using Firehose is seeing idiotic asides like this inserted into submissions, but knowing that it'll make the front page anyway, and also knowing that absolutely no editing will be done.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
The Intel work you reference is just bonding an indium phosphide laser chip onto a silicon wafer, not actually creating a silicon laser by itself. While a Raman laser has been produced in silicon, the real device of interest, an electrically pumped diode laser is still the stuff of dreams.
When I was a grad student at UCLA, a postdoc and I collected some data in lab. The professor decided it would well complement the review article to have this new information. So, it happens, and not necessarily to dodge peer review.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
I mean, the article's about a completely flat sheet of atoms joined in a structure with four edges from eac node. So, why are they showing a ripply surface made from a hexagonal structure, with three edges from each node?
As you note in your follow-up post, the hexagonal bonding structure is correct for graphene. The rippling motion is a result of thermal fluctuations. Normally you don't see it much because the graphene is bonded to a substrate, but as the second link in the main article explains, free standing membranes do actually ripple.
[Graphene....]nanometer-scale silicon lasers... Our current tech will look like molasses when these are coupled.
Just wait till you see what happens when they start adding the sharks...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Like the GP said; "Good on paper."
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I think what you meant to say was "I for one welcome our new carbon transistor overloards". I don't know what makes you dumber, the fact that you tried recycling that tired joke or that you couldn't even get the simple equation for the joke right.
In Soviet Russia, tired joke recycles YOU!
The Carbon atom is around 0.2nm width. If they can make gates with a single atom (lets ignore interconnection),
this means that we can go up to 0.2nm (This is just 8 generations away from 45nm or less than 20 years).
I guess that to keep the Moore's law, we'll go to 3D chips much earlier (my 2 cents that we'll have mass
produced 3D chips before or during 22nm).
Peer Review is a very important thing. Not only it prevents some bad reseaarch from entering Journals, but it actually increases the quality of articles published - because Referees ask meaningful Questions, whcih can help to clarify unclear points.
If you can come up with an (cost&energy) efficent way to extract pure carbon from the CO2 in the atmosphere. I want to buy some of your stock.
We are all just people.
.. although it's going to take an awful large layer of 1-atom thick carbon to remove all that CO2 from the atmosphere.
I got one.
Plant a tree.
Yeah, but don't you have the kill the tree then burn it to extract the carbon?
Sounds like a good idea to me!
Har?
I think "thermal fluctuations" as a reason for the ripples comes about because these interconversions have a high activation energy, so they are likely to occur only at "hot spots" caused that develop from random lattice vibrations. I would imagine that random thermal motion of atoms in the lattice would strain bonds with adjacent carbon atoms, and bond strain could move through the lattice, occasionally adding up to strain a bond enough to break it and form a defect. Just like the pentagons in fullerenes, these defects would provide curvature to the lattice- in the case of a graphene monolayer, evidently just enough to make the sheet "wavy," rather than enough to make it fold in on itself (or rip itself apart trying).
Once again, just a guess- I don't have access to the paper, so I don't know if the nature of the ripples is explained more fully there.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
I agree. I don't understand what's so controversial about releasing a paper via multiple routes. The onus would be on the researchers; if they release via a peer-reviewed journal, while also publishing some other way, and then it's rejected during the peer review, well, they'd look pretty stupid then, no?
That's not very "controversial." It's ballsy, and arguably arrogant and stupid, but I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with it. Personally, I'd like to see more science be published outside expensive peer-reviewed journals, where regular folks can have access to it without going through complicated databases. At the same time, I understand the purpose that peer-review serves, and we don't want to eliminate that along the way.
I'm particularly galled by journals that demand exclusivity agreements in order to accept papers for publication, or have gag rules that quash discussion of papers that are being reviewed. That seems contrary to the collaborative nature of science and generally counterproductive (as well as just generally creepy and fascist; I don't much like the idea of anyone telling me that I can't talk about stuff, particularly if I were someone who'd just spend years working on it).
The only thing I think is a little controversial -- and I'm not even sure I'd choose that word, maybe just "inadvisable" -- is that Nature seems to be going ahead and running the non-reviewed version, even though they could just wait and see a little longer, and make sure that it doesn't get rejected. If a flaw is discovered during the peer review, now it's not just the researchers that are going to look dumb, but anyone who printed the un-reviewed version.
To say that there's "controversy" about the way they released the article seems to imply that there's tension between peer-reviewed and standard modes of publication, and I think that tension is mostly manufactured or artificial. There's no reason why both modes of publication can't co-exist and compliment each other.
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