Last Updated on Sunday, 08 April 2012 07:51 Published on
Thursday, 04 February 2010 20:08 Researchers are running into
the physical limits of speed and scaling in silicon transistor
technology, forcing them to look elsewhere for next-generation
devices. The leading candidate to replace silicon being pursued
by, well, pretty much everyone, is graphene. Graphene, single
sheets of graphitic carbon, is exciting because it is a single
atom thick and has remarkably high electron mobilities (100
times greater than silicon), making it ideally suited to atomic-
scale, high-speed operation. Also, graphene's electrical
properties can be controlled, switching it among conducting,
semiconducting and electrically insulating forms. That means
graphene-only (or, more likely, graphene-mostly) devices are, in
principle, possible. In this week's Science, researchers from
IBM demonstrate graphene-based field effect transistors (FETs)
that may operate at much higher speeds (100GHz) than Si FETs.
Graphene layers were thermally grow