Breakthrough Grows Graphene On Silicon Substrate 60
eldavojohn writes "A new paper entitled Epitaxial Graphene on Silicon toward Graphene-Silicon Fusion Electronics published by a group of physicists at Tohoku University in Japan has demonstrated that they can grow graphene on a silicon substrate and pair that technique with conventional lithography to create a graphene-on-silicon field effect transistor. For quite sometime we've been discussing the supermaterial graphene being used like silicon improving everything from memory density to transistors. Given this demonstration, are we witnessing the start of a new era in electronics or are there more hurdles to clear before the manufacturers adopt this fabrication process and embrace graphene?"
The answer is yes. (Score:2, Insightful)
A. Yes.
Why are these two things considered by the submitter to be mutually exclusive?? It is both a potential new era of electronics AND there is the potential that there are hurdles to clear. What's the purpose of trying to editorialize a press release?
I KNOW THAT! (Score:3, Insightful)
Or at least I thought I did, (for some reason I thought 1 atmosphere = 32ft. water :)
What I meant to say is that think of the relative strength of a mesh A SINGLE ATOM THICK (sorry for the caps, I don't know how to do italics) being able to hold back the incredible number of molecular impacts one atmosphere of pressure implies. If you layered this mesh to be much much thicker so that it actually was macroscopic in thickness (like a tissue paper) it would be millions (billions? trillions?) of atoms thick. Think how much pressure it could contain!
If a mesh say a million atoms thick (or make it a hundred million for a hundred fold safety margin) could contain a gas at a million atmospheres, it would revolutionize space travel (and every other form of transportation not to mention SCUBA diving). Yet the walls of such a pressure vessel would be so thin that, edge on, they wouldn't even be visible to the human eye!
Now that's what I call a super material.