Samsung Claims Breakthrough In Graphene Chip Design

jfruh (300774) writes "Graphene, a carbon-based crystalline lattice that is extremely strong, lightweight, and an excellent conductor of electricity and heat, is coveted as a potential base for semiconductor chip design, and Samsung, working with the Sungkyungkwan University School of Advanced Materials Science and Engineering, has claimed a big jump towards that goal. With IBM also making progress in this realm, the days of silicon could actually be numbered."

Comments

Producing them is one thing

[Viol8]

Producing them cheaply enough to rival chips made of processed sand is another matter entirely. Anyone remember gallium arsenide chips that were going to eat silicon for lunch back in the 80s? Yeah , well.... still niche.

Re:Producing them is one thing

[geekoid]

Because silicon dropped in price rather dramatically.
I don't really see any process on the horizon that will cause another drop like that. It would require a break through making = 22nm fabs much cheaper to build and maintain.

If they made a significant break through where they are competitive, then things will change fast.
The demand for more efficient chips has never been higher.

Re:Producing them is one thing

[AmbiLobe]

The expansion of carbon does not match the expansion of insulators when the temperature changes. Silicon matches the thermal size changes of silicon dioxide. If Samsung has matched the coefficients of expansion, it is big news. But that was not announced.

Re:Producing them is one thing

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Silicon has always been cheaper, not just recently. Any fancy substrate or switch technology will be unusable as a replacement for silicon if it can't at least approach the density of silicon circuits. We can manufacture extremely complex circuits using the very simple procedures of silicon crystal growing, doping, photolithography, and epitaxy. The moderate cost of modern ICs in the middle of the synchronous price-per-component curve (as per Moore's law) is the result of the combination of these simple procedures (which are ridiculously simplistic when it comes to simple components) with doing them at extreme geometrical complexities (which is *the* thing that makes ICs expensive). Even if you could demonstrate a single graphene switch today, you would still be where Jean Hoerni's planar silicon transistor was in 1960. Now find out how this supposedly very tough material can be either deposited and grown into proper shapes or substractively machined at nanoscale, and all that at high speeds needed for mass IC manufacture.

Re:Producing them is one thing

[Warbothong]

Producing them cheaply enough to rival chips made of processed sand is another matter entirely. Anyone remember gallium arsenide chips that were going to eat silicon for lunch back in the 80s? Yeah , well.... still niche.

To a first approximation, I'd say the cost of "applying sticky-tape to coal" isn't very different to "processing sand".

Gallium Arsenide, on the other hand, sounds complicated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

Re:Producing them is one thing

[Charliemopps]

OR... they could pull off a 16bit chip that can withstand temps up to 3000 degrees and is impervious to EMP attacks and you have the defense industry paying you all the money you want to figure it out.

Re:Producing them is one thing

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Silicon ain't no picnic either.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?f...

Re:Producing them is one thing

[camelrider]

The expansion of carbon does not match the expansion of insulators when the temperature changes. Silicon matches the thermal size changes of silicon dioxide. If Samsung has matched the coefficients of expansion, it is big news. But that was not announced.

This insight deserves more than one mod-point! It's the key. For some types of processors or memory size may not be as important as speed or electrical efficiency, but without a compatible insulating layer they can't be built.

Re:Producing them is one thing

[wagnerrp]

The problem is that transistors are thermoelectric devices. You switch them on and off by heating them up to change their conductivity. Silicon chips can withstand temperatures well beyond the point at which the plastic packages they are mounted to break down, but that temperature is also well beyond their switching point, making them useless as a computational device.

If you could produce a semiconductor that was useful at 3000F, then that would be its normal operating temperature, and you would need to feed it a high enough core voltage to allow it to heat itself up to that temperature to switch.

This violates apple patent

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure they will be getting sued soon.

Re:This violates apple patent

[meta-monkey]

Are the graphene chips rounded rectangles?

Re:This violates apple patent

[lgw]

I figured the whole graphene craze was just a last-ditch attempt to get around Apple's patent on sand (part of their patent on glass).

Was this a PR statement or major breakthrough?

[GodfatherofSoul]

That seems like an odd announcement to make...if it's just one more step in the research process and this doesn't make graphene a viable replacement *yet*...

Re:Was this a PR statement or major breakthrough?

[bobbied]

That seems like an odd announcement to make...if it's just one more step in the research process and this doesn't make graphene a viable replacement *yet*...

It's about the research funding and securing more... They must be out of money so they need to go out hawking their wares to secure more R&D funding.

Re:Was this a PR statement or major breakthrough?

[sumakor]

It is big step towards making graphene a viable, scaleable technology rather than a lab experiment.

Incompetent article writer?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I think that an article whose author claims that "Germanium ... doesn't occur naturally" and that "400Ghz ... should make for some strong signals" ought to be taken with a very large lab-grown monocrystal of salt.

Original article...

[Heraklit]

Here's the original article (paywalled, Science magazine): https://www.sciencemag.org/con...

Re:silicon could actually be numbered.

[Zero__Kelvin]

You're assuming he's referring to an actual human being; for his purposes the useage was correct ;-)

Seriously, this is great news!

[sumakor]

Graphene needed this technological development. It was a pre-requisite for electronics applications, which are currently based on large single crystal silicon wafers. For comparison, this is something that's yet to be achieved with carbon nanotubes, which still have no electronics applications despite being 13 years older than graphene and having excellent properties. People have the same attitude towards graphene: yeah it's great, but it may never be integrated into any mass-produced products and it may just die out and fade away. So if Samsung can grow monocrystalline graphene many inches across, it moves graphene from some pie-in-the-sky research material like nanotubes to something we could actually commercialize. It knocks out one of the big legs from the "Graphene will never replace silicon," argument. Although not all the questions about graphene have been answered, this advance makes those questions and their answers matter a lot more to many more people than they did last week.

What a differnec e a couple of year can make.

[The Grim Reefer]

With IBM also making progress in this realm, the days of silicon could actually be numbered.

IBM: Graphene as it is won't replace silicon in CPUs

Re:What a differnec e a couple of year can make.

[geekoid]

SIgh. The article you link, from 2011, says "yet"
Its all about creating a band gap, with with silcon doping*.
However, their is research in this area.

http://www-als.lbl.gov/index.p...

*yeah yeah, but people get the idea.

Re:Take that peak silicone!

[wbr1]

Silicon -not- silicone.
I have seen silicone peaks, and they are entirely different.

Graphene products - where to dump them??

[bmullan]

Computer/Electronic waste is already such a huge problem that whole companies exist whose existance is to ship that waste to 3rd world countries where they are more or less dumped to contaminate water & soils.
Since from everything I've read Graphene is nearly indestructable.... "It would take an elephant, balanced on a pencil, to break through a sheet of graphene the thickness of Saran Wrap [cling film]." - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/pro...

Before it becomes the next asbestos or coal-ash.. that no one "wants in their town"... anyone heard how Graphene based waste would be handled??

Re:Graphene products - where to dump them??

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Man, where can I get that kind of a pencil?

Re:silicon could actually be numbered.

[JDeane]

This thread does give me an idea... Breast implants that double as computers... of course nipples as a mouse might make things awkward in public.

"I'm checking my email you perv!!!" *slap* lol