Breakthrough Grows Graphene On Silicon Substrate

eldavojohn writes "A new paper entitled Epitaxial Graphene on Silicon toward Graphene-Silicon Fusion Electronics published by a group of physicists at Tohoku University in Japan has demonstrated that they can grow graphene on a silicon substrate and pair that technique with conventional lithography to create a graphene-on-silicon field effect transistor. For quite sometime we've been discussing the supermaterial graphene being used like silicon improving everything from memory density to transistors. Given this demonstration, are we witnessing the start of a new era in electronics or are there more hurdles to clear before the manufacturers adopt this fabrication process and embrace graphene?"

Comments

Not so great

[silverpig]

This isn't a huge breakthrough. First, their dirac peaks, while graphene-like, look horrible. This means the quality of graphene they are dealing with is very low. In fact, they don't thermally decompose all of the SiC, so they're still not much different than the SiC decomposition method. Something like this method holds much more promise. CVD growth of graphene on a copper substrate and subsequent rapid etching of the copper yields HUGE 30+" sheets of single to tri-layer graphene films.