hniw.us On life in Seattle and things best left unsaidお化粧はどしたの芸者さん

IBM Continues their forward march in bringing about the end of an era, one that began in the 1960s at Bell Laboratories where the first transistor was made.  Oddly enough, what began with germanium quickly transitioned to silicon and the semiconductor industry that we know of today.  Though there are patents for transistors dating back to the early 1920s, it wasn’t until Shockley’s work, expanding on that of Bardeen and Brattain, that we came to have the transistors that we know and love today.  But it seems that all of that may soon be coming to an end, with the rapid research taking place in the fields of plasmonics and especially graphene.

We all want faster, more efficient, machines but we are starting to reach the limits of what can be done with silicon and silicon based electronics.  Replacements are being research, such as the PlasMOStor DOI: 10.1021/nl803868k suggested by Henry Atwater, but it would be nice to have alternatives that offer more of a drop-in replacement for the infrastructure we currently have.  That is where graphene comes in.  Graphene, for those of you wondering, is a single layer of graphite – the stuff in pencils – and has become one of the latest buzzwords in the field.  A better description graphene is offered by A. K. Geim et. al.

Graphene is a flat monolayer of carbon atoms tightly packed into a two-dimensional (2D) honeycomb lattice, and is a basic building block for graphitic materials of all other dimensionalities. It can be wrapped up into 0D fullerenes, rolled into 1D nanotubes or stacked into 3D graphite.^[1]

And now IBM has managed to demonstrate a 100GHz transistor fashioned from this same material.  If memory serves, that is about 10x faster than the fastest silicon transistor to be demonstrated.  We are still a ways off from having graphene based CPUs, GPUs and APUs, but they are coming and with the blistering rate at which IBM has been moving I would say they’ll be here sooner than any of us expects.

1. Geim, A. K. and Novoselov, K. S. (2007). “The rise of graphene”. Nature Materials 6 (3): 183–191. doi:10.1038/nmat1849. http://onnes.ph.man.ac.uk/nano/Publications/Naturemat_2007Review.pdf.

And here you though pencil lead was only good for writing.  As it turns out, when you take graphite and whittle it down to a two-dimensional structure, the stuff becomes pretty amazing.  Terahertz amazing, as in the stuff is predicted to allow us to replace silicon-based microelectronics with parts that are 100-1000 times faster.  It is pretty impressive stuff, especially if it can do the job more cheaper and more efficiently than silicon.  I won’t abandon my hopes for light based computing, but instead of silicon waveguides (DOI: 10.1021/nl803868k), maybe I should start to look into ways to create the same device using graphene.  To summarize, for those keeping track of the latest in graphene news, we have IBM coming out with their announcement of finally being able to open a bandgap for graphene field-effect transistors (FETs) and now Penn State can fabricate sheets of pure graphene on 100mm wafers.  It still involves silicon and the sizes are about 200mm off from what is currently used in the industry, but we’re getting there and we are getting there fast.