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

That's one slick transistor

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you and goodnight! :)

Works at room temperature?

[timeOday]

Wow, silicon will never match that! Now I don't have to work in this darn freon chamber all day.

Re:Works at room temperature?

[wass]

You know of a silicon single electron transistor that also works at room temperature? I know some groups have made room-temperature quantum dots previously, but I don't know of any silicon ones. Those other room-temp ones are carbon nanotubes with nano-leads spaced about 10nm apart, in which case they're really graphene already.

Anyway, graphene has a number of very interesting properties, such as its band structure which looks like a Minkowski space-time cone (or MCP from Tron). Graphene is such that its Fermi energy lies exactly at the cone intersection, and is a so-called zero bandgap semiconductor. Density of states around these conical regimes open up all sorts of applications.

Interesting story, one group in physics spent lots of time and $$$ trying to make a nano-pencil to try to create a single graphene layer. Ie, they put a chunk of graphite on an AFM tip, and tapped it onto a substrate, making the world's smallest pencil, and thought they may have had a few areas where the resulting line was single layer thick.

In one of the ultimate cases of getting scooped, a competing team from Harvard took a pencil, scribbled on a piece of paper, and used scotch tape to tap down on the pencil marks. Then tapping that tape onto another substrate gave large areas which had single graphene layers. So the first group was scooped by a team that used literally pennies worth of materials on a process that takes only minutes, while they spent over a year and tens of thousands of dollars on the nano-pencil technique! Cue cliches about thinking outside the box.

controversy

[esocid]

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.

practical?

[wizardforce]

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.

Re:practical?

[Chris Burke]

Yep, those are all realistic concerns and issues that must be addressed before this will really become a silicon killer.

At the same time, look at the amazing technology that goes into producing silicon chips today. Something that seems ludicrous to mass produce today may just take a decade or so of process and manufacturing technology advancements. On the other hand more research will also probably give silicon a longer life than what anyone predicts (since the death of the silicon CMOSFET has been predicted for decades).

So I agree, what comes in the future will be interesting.

Re:practical?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

need to be able to be mass-produced, scalable and just as reliable as alternatives [silicon, quantum computers etc.]

John Connor, is that you? I gotta tell you, when you come from, quantum computers might be mass-produced, scalable and reliable, but today they aren't just yet...

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 :)

Re:practical?

[dimeglio]

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).

Think how much redundancy you can build into devices of that size. You can have thousands of quantum based CPU's each of them redundant and part of an array for less than the size of current devices. Decisions could be consensus based thus eliminating rogue CPUs for example.

Re:Make it first

[ozmanjusri]

whenever you use a pencil

Like the GP said; "Good on paper."

Re:overlord

[Experiment 626]

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!

Re:A cure to global warming?

[jbengt]

I got one.

Plant a tree.