New Graphene Research Promises Reliable Chip-Level Production

An anonymous reader writes "A research team from the University of Texas and a German nanotechnology company have published a paper which describes a major milestone for the future of graphene-based computing – the reliable production of wafer-scale graphene measuring between 100 and 300mm, suitable at last for integration with 'traditional' materials in computing. The research team was able to manufacture 25,000 graphene field-effect transistors from lab-produced graphene film on a polycrystalline copper base. Team research leader Deji Akinwande said: 'Our process is based on the scalable concept of growing graphene on copper-coated silicon substrates...Once we had developed a suitable method for growing high-quality graphene with negligible numbers of defects in small sample sizes, it was relatively straightforward for us to scale up.'"(Original, paywalled paper is at ACS Nano.)

Comments

Article written by clueless PR bots

[CajunArson]

The non-paywalled article includes some hilarious zingers like "the material also has extraordinary semiconductive properties which could revolutionise the issue of cooling in data centres."

If by "extraodinary" you mean: No bandgap unless you are really doctoring the graphene with other materials, then sure since "ordinary" semiconductors have bandgaps.

Not sure how transistors that can't be turned off will help in cooling data centers, but who knows what revolutions lurk in future press releases!

Re:Article written by clueless PR bots

[Anonymous Coward]

Graphene semi-conductors can run both cooler and much, much faster from what I've seen. There are also different substrates to grow it on, which one will be best is a question.

But there's little question that Graphene could well replace silicon for processors soon enough. Between much higher electron mobility, and thus much higher clockspeeds, better quantum tunneling behavior than silicon allowing Moore's law to continue beyond 7nm feature size, and the seemingly endless interest in the material from corporations and universities I'd bet graphene based processors (and other parts of a computer) will be here within a decade or sooner

Re:Abstract from paper published ACS Nano:

[Required Snark]

This is significant progress, but "better" does not mean good enough. Consider the following:

"150 and 300 mm wafers reveals >95% monolayer uniformity". If I understand current process yield amounts, a single layer that is only 95% good is not sufficient for large scale manufacturing. You need lots of layers, and the yield goes down with the product of the percentages for each layer.

"26000 graphene field-effect transistors were realized". On 100mm or 300mm? Compared to current density for VLSI it's many orders of magnitude off.

"About 18% of devices show mobility of >3000 cm2/(V s), more than 3 times higher than prior results ". Wonderful, but prior art was only 6%. What are the values for the other 82%? Are they useful at all?

"polycrystalline graphene". Are their any currently deployed polycrystalline graphene transistor devices? I thought that to make graphene really shine it needs to be more uniform then polycrystalline, hence more a single crystal structure.

So if you think that university press releases are bullcrap, then wanna-be company press releases are significantly lower on the food chain. Cockroach crap? Flea crap?