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

Interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if this will help me 3D print a drone? I was originally going to use Raspberry Pi, but might use a graphene based product instead. I would like to start a delivery service which accepts bitcoin as payment for Apple products.

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!