First Graphene Transistor 83
An anonymous reader writes "UK researchers are announcing the first ever workable transistor made of graphene — that's one layer of carbon atoms. It's thinner and smaller than a silicon transistor can ever be, and it works at room temperature. When silicon electronics are dead, this is what many speculate is going to take over. There's slight controversy as they decided to announce their results via a review article, rather than wait for their (submitted) peer review paper to come out."
No Waiting? (Score:2, Insightful)
That's one slick transistor (Score:4, Funny)
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You'll need it.
Re:overlord (Score:5, Funny)
I think what you meant to say was "I for one welcome our new carbon transistor overloards". I don't know what makes you dumber, the fact that you tried recycling that tired joke or that you couldn't even get the simple equation for the joke right.
In Soviet Russia, tired joke recycles YOU!
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Soviet India (Score:2)
"In Soviet India, you're gonna get Instant Korma."
It works on so many levels : )
Works at room temperature? (Score:5, Funny)
A cure to global warming? (Score:2)
Gas in, horsepower and transistors out!
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Re:A cure to global warming? (Score:4, Insightful)
Plant a tree.
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Sounds like a good idea to me!
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Not after you burn it though.
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Re:Works at room temperature? (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, graphene has a number of very interesting properties, such as its band structure which looks like a Minkowski space-time cone (or MCP from Tron). Graphene is such that its Fermi energy lies exactly at the cone intersection, and is a so-called zero bandgap semiconductor. Density of states around these conical regimes open up all sorts of applications.
Interesting story, one group in physics spent lots of time and $$$ trying to make a nano-pencil to try to create a single graphene layer. Ie, they put a chunk of graphite on an AFM tip, and tapped it onto a substrate, making the world's smallest pencil, and thought they may have had a few areas where the resulting line was single layer thick.
In one of the ultimate cases of getting scooped, a competing team from Harvard took a pencil, scribbled on a piece of paper, and used scotch tape to tap down on the pencil marks. Then tapping that tape onto another substrate gave large areas which had single graphene layers. So the first group was scooped by a team that used literally pennies worth of materials on a process that takes only minutes, while they spent over a year and tens of thousands of dollars on the nano-pencil technique! Cue cliches about thinking outside the box.
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Way to think outside the nano-pencil!
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controversy (Score:4, Insightful)
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Surely it would have been better for the summary to contain a bit of actual detail on the article rather than just the author's speculation and a slightly over-the-top criticism of the release procedure.
Manufactured controversy. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not very "controversial." It's ballsy, and arguably arrogant and stupid, but I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with it. Personally, I'd like to see more science be published outside expensive peer-reviewed journals, where regular folks can have access to it without going through complicated databases. At the same time, I understand the purpose that peer-review serves, and we don't want to eliminate that along the way.
I'm particularly galled by journals that demand exclusivity agreements in order to accept papers for publication, or have gag rules that quash discussion of papers that are being reviewed. That seems contrary to the collaborative nature of science and generally counterproductive (as well as just generally creepy and fascist; I don't much like the idea of anyone telling me that I can't talk about stuff, particularly if I were someone who'd just spend years working on it).
The only thing I think is a little controversial -- and I'm not even sure I'd choose that word, maybe just "inadvisable" -- is that Nature seems to be going ahead and running the non-reviewed version, even though they could just wait and see a little longer, and make sure that it doesn't get rejected. If a flaw is discovered during the peer review, now it's not just the researchers that are going to look dumb, but anyone who printed the un-reviewed version.
To say that there's "controversy" about the way they released the article seems to imply that there's tension between peer-reviewed and standard modes of publication, and I think that tension is mostly manufactured or artificial. There's no reason why both modes of publication can't co-exist and compliment each other.
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practical? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:practical? (Score:5, Insightful)
At the same time, look at the amazing technology that goes into producing silicon chips today. Something that seems ludicrous to mass produce today may just take a decade or so of process and manufacturing technology advancements. On the other hand more research will also probably give silicon a longer life than what anyone predicts (since the death of the silicon CMOSFET has been predicted for decades).
So I agree, what comes in the future will be interesting.
Re:practical? (Score:5, Insightful)
Its one thing getting one transistor working in ideal conditions
I think background radiation will be one of its main reasons it will fail for a CPU and RAM. With a structure 1 atom thick there is no room for failure. Either an atom exists or it doesn't. Knock an atom out of place then it fails. With a conventional transistor as its bulk material all that happens is it degrades its performance but it can take it (most of the time).
When I first started to read the article I thought it sounded a bit like the Ballistic transistor. Its interesting the Wiki also mentions Graphene as a way to form Ballistic transistors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_transistor [wikipedia.org]
I really hope it works as it could create incredible computers
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That's true, and actually with current silicon device sizes a single alpha particle strike has the possibility of flipping a bit in an SRAM.
Re:practical? (Score:4, Informative)
That's actually not true at all. The chance a transient error (SRAM bit flip) or worse, a long term change in the threshold voltage of a device actually gets worse when the structures are larger. That is because the chance for a radiation event to occur in the gate oxide is linearly proportional to the thickness of the oxide. Fine-line CMOS has thinner oxides, so it is more tolerant.
On top of that, what you are discussing (shielding, structure geometry) is called radiation tolerance, not radiation hardening. A radiation hard IC process implies dielectric isolation between the devices. For example, the use of SOI is quite prevelent in nuclear/space applications. The reason NASA uses old CPUs is because they are available in rad-hard dielectrially isolated technology. Intersil in Palm Bay, FL, still has rad-hard 286s coming off the line right now. Dielectrically isolated IC processes with the feature sizes needed to produce modern CPUs simply do not exist because of the lack of an economic incentive. That is the only reason NASA and DOD use such old CPUs.
Re:practical? (Score:4, Insightful)
Think how much redundancy you can build into devices of that size. You can have thousands of quantum based CPU's each of them redundant and part of an array for less than the size of current devices. Decisions could be consensus based thus eliminating rogue CPUs for example.
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I think background radiation will be one of its main reasons it will fail for a CPU and RAM. With a structure 1 atom thick there is no room for failure. Either an atom exists or it doesn't. Knock an atom out of place then it fails. With a conventional transistor as its bulk material all that happens is it degrades its performance but it can take it (most of the time).
Can't that be managed with error correction? If you can run these redundantly 1000 times, still be faster and smaller than silicon, and ha
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Moreover, gra
Re:practical? (Score:5, Funny)
John Connor, is that you? I gotta tell you, when you come from, quantum computers might be mass-produced, scalable and reliable, but today they aren't just yet...
Re:practical? (Score:4, Informative)
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FINALLY... (Score:4, Funny)
oh, wait; GRAPHene... oops.
2020 is a long time (Score:3, Insightful)
I think if this is to be used in consumer products, market forces will tell them how long they have. Big leaps often come in short time spans. 13 years is a long time and it seems the longer we wait for something to come to market, the more likely it seems to be vapour ware. If this is pure research, they can take their time (and pure research is a good thing too).
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Current industry predictions suggest that by 2020 silicon devices will have shrunk to about 20 nanometres...
I think if this is to be used in consumer products, market forces will tell them how long they have. Big leaps often come in short time spans. 13 years is a long time and it seems the
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But lucky for you, one more arrogant ass will typically pass without comment.
But not today! Welcome to the club.
Re:2020 is a long time (Score:4, Insightful)
The node is supposed to be the 22nm node and is only two shrinks away. This means the big companies are hiring R&D personal for that node right now, we are not talking about 2020.
I would not be worried about physics, but rather about economics. Currently many big companies are exiting process development and cutting edge manufacturing and start to rely on foundries. And we are talking top10 companies: Texas Instruments (inventor of the IC!), Sony, Infineon, Cypress, NXP (Philips), NEC (to some extend). The number of foundries supplying the most advanced manufacturing processes is much less than the number of companies quitting development - maybe 3 to 4.
Less parallelism in development means that there is less variety, which will lead to a slowdown. Also the funding for R&D at tool vendors will reduce as a direct consequence of having fewer people buying experimental tools. By the time the graphene transistor would be ready there may very well be just one or two companies being able to make use of it..
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IBM,AMD and IBM,Chartered are part of a development alliance so their strategies are pretty similar. You forgot UMC.
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Quite the opposite - it may appear that they do - but for (almost) all complex modern technological advances they require many many years of research, planning, problem solving and development before they have something that is consumer grade.
20 Years may be on the upper end of things, but I can speak from my own research area that OLED technology has been in serious development since the early nineties, and it is only in the last couple of years that we have seen c
i thought (Score:2)
"First Graphene Calculator"
Which would make sense, as that's basically what transistor does, only it's been done already...
I know, I know, I know...
When silicon electronics are dead... (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the disadvantages of using Firehose is seeing idiotic asides like this inserted into submissions, but knowing that it'll make the front page anyway, and also knowing that absolutely no editing will be done.
Re:When silicon electronics are dead.... (Score:1)
Make it first (Score:1)
Re:Make it first (Score:4, Insightful)
Like the GP said; "Good on paper."
Impressive (Score:2, Interesting)
Imagine fiber optic motherboard traces with chips made out of graphene. It might to move us to counting in terehertz.
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Obligatory (Score:3, Funny)
Just wait till you see what happens when they start adding the sharks...
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What's with the picture in TFA? (Score:2)
So, why are they showing a ripply surface made from a hexagonal structure, with three edges from each node?
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Perfect graphene is flat. But any imperfections caused by a missing carbon or an extra carbon will cause it to bend slightly. Which would explain the ripples.
Source from wikipedia :
Perfect graphenes consist exclusively of hexagonal cells; pentagonal and heptagonal cells constitute defects. If an isolated pentagonal cell is present, then the plane warps into a cone shape; insertion of 12 pentagons would create a fullerene. Likewise, insertion of an isolated heptagon causes the sheet to become saddle-shaped. Controlled addition of pentagons and heptagons would allow a wide variety of shapes to be made.
Re:What's with the picture in TFA? (Score:4, Informative)
I mean, the article's about a completely flat sheet of atoms joined in a structure with four edges from eac node. So, why are they showing a ripply surface made from a hexagonal structure, with three edges from each node?
As you note in your follow-up post, the hexagonal bonding structure is correct for graphene. The rippling motion is a result of thermal fluctuations. Normally you don't see it much because the graphene is bonded to a substrate, but as the second link in the main article explains, free standing membranes do actually ripple.
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FT*2nd*A:
One of graphene's simplest properties - that of being a perfectly flat 2D sheet - is the most mystifying of all, said Geim. In theory, thermal fluctuations should cause any perfect 2D crystal to vibrate out of the plane, with sufficient energy to break its bonds. Scientists had surmised that graphene could only appear both stable and perfectly flat because it was usually stabilised on a substrate.
But in Nature this week, Geim's team also reveals that the supposedly flat sheet is in fact corrugated; tiny ripples of graphene crystallites make the sheets 3D when suspended in isolation
The article explains that free standing graphene could not exist on its own if it was not intrinsiclly rippled. What they discovered was that graphene actually has a rippled structure when isolated which allows them to use it in such a fashion. So its my understanding that thermal fluctuations are not the cause of the ripples, instead something in the nature of graphene is. It would be nice it they would explain why it is rippled. Is it because of imperfections or simply the nature of the s
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I think "thermal fluctuations" as a reason for the ripples comes about because these interconversions have a high activation energy, so they are likely to occur only at "hot spots"
Scrible me a CPU (Score:1)
and as soon as that's ready, grab yourself some epaper and a pencil
and get ready to design your own quad core 64bit WHSmith CPU
how about that for Linux from Scratch
true hardcore means no erasors
New data in a review article (Score:2, Interesting)
What about the more immediate solution to Silicon? (Score:1)
Re:What about the more immediate solution to Silic (Score:1)
0.2nm technology is the limit (Score:2, Interesting)
this means that we can go up to 0.2nm (This is just 8 generations away from 45nm or less than 20 years).
I guess that to keep the Moore's law, we'll go to 3D chips much earlier (my 2 cents that we'll have mass
produced 3D chips before or during 22nm).
Peer Review! (Score:2, Informative)
Also a viable solution to Climate Change! (Score:2, Funny)
First?? (Score:1)
Room Temperature (Score:2)
That may be well and good, except that most chips are running at 55C. and above. That's not my room temperature.