Graphene-based transistors may be on the horizon (this is a scientific game-changer)

[DainBramaged]

Graphene is today's miracle material. It is strong, it is flexible, and it conducts electricity. It possibly also wears its underpants on the outside of its tights and rescues kids from burning buildings.

The conductivity part is perhaps the most exciting. Graphene allows electrons to move ballistically, meaning they don't face any resistance, but require an external voltage in order to move. That's actually a blessing and a curse. Modern electonics relies on materials that can be switched from being good conductors to poor conductors by a control voltage. If graphene naturally conducts and that can't be changed, it might not be all that useful for electronics. A couple of papers in Nature Physics report that all is not lost and, with the right structuring, three layers of graphene allows it to be turned from insulator to conductor via a control voltage.

All of this comes about because graphene is not a metal-like conductor. In metals, there are lots of free electrons floating around occupying a continuum of states. These reach right down into the energy regions where one would expect electrons to stay bound to individual atoms. Graphene, on the other hand, is more like a semiconductor—its conducting electrons fall into a discrete range of states, and the lowest energy of these just happens to coincide with that of the highest energy of a bound electron.

Because these two energy states are just barely touching, there is always the hope that you can manipulate the graphene to shift them apart. This shift would create a bandgap, an energy gap between electrons bound to atoms and those that are free to move around. If you can do that shifting on demand, then you have created a graphene switch and the road is open for graphene based electronics and companies like Samsung could make their shareholders very happy. But how to do it?

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/10/graphene-is-better-as-a-threesome.ars


The promise of fast like we never knew before. And smaller than we ever knew.

[NNN0LHI]

1. I can remember when people were musing if transistors were something we found on alien space craft

That is how advanced they seemed to be at that time they were discovered.

Don

[buddysmellgood]

2. Cool.