IBM Builds First Graphene Integrated Circuit

AffidavitDonda writes "IBM researchers have built the first integrated circuit (IC) based on a graphene transistor. The circuit, built on a wafer of silicon carbide, consists of field-effect transistors made of graphene. The IC also includes metallic structures, such as on-chip inductors and the transistors' sources and drains. The circuit the team built is a broadband radio-frequency mixer, a fundamental component of radios that processes signals by finding the difference between two high-frequency wavelengths."

Re:This is an extremely important accomplishment.

[gman003]

Programmer time is more expensive than hardware time. If a less efficient language is easier to use, it makes business sense to use it to save money.

This does not explain the slow languages that are difficult to use, but it does explain why assembly has fallen from favor, and why C is in decline.

Re:This is an extremely important accomplishment.

[lurgyman]

Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. A mixer is an analog circuit, and silicon carbide is an expensive substrate to work with (very high processing temperatures), so it is typically only worthwhile for high-power analog devices. There is no discussion about anything digital in this article, so this is not related to programming languages or computers. Many analog devices have been made beyond 100 GHz on plain old silicon too; graphene on SiC may be important by enabling greater power density at high frequencies. As a microwave engineer, I'm excited about this, but this needs to happen on an inexpensive IC process for very small devices to be useful for digital circuits.

Re:This is an extremely important accomplishment.

[Lunix Nutcase]

15 years of optimization from Sun just to bring it within a magnitude of C? That seems quite a bit of effort wasted.

Re:Gigahertz are useless...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you're full of shit. Graphene isn't useful for digital circuits at all (at least yet) because it has crappy on-off ratios, but GHz are most definitely useful for radio work.

Remember how everybody's using their mobiles for everything these days, and streaming video keeps getting more popular and higher bitrate? Well, when you run out of spectrum below 5GHz (where all mobile networks currently operate), getting up into the 10-100GHz range is extremely useful to provide that extra bandwidth.

Since nobody but actual electrical engineers seems to know anything about radio anymore (used to be a common hobby for geeks, but I guess it's not "cool" anymore), let me explain one application of a mixer like the one described in TFA. You can use it to make a transverter, which takes a signal from your UHF radio (maybe a mobile phone, wifi card, whatever), and kicks it up to ~10GHz for transmission. And flips received signals back down to the original ~2GHz band.

Not impressed? Sure, 10GHz isn't much, we can easily beat that already -- it's only a prototype. But it's quite likely we'll have 100GHz-1THz in the lab inside a year, and on the market in ~5. There's a whole lot of bandwidth north of 30GHz, and (as long as you stay out of absorption bands like O2 at 60GHz, which limit you to short-range stuff like wifi/bluetooth replacements), it's eminently usable for urban cellular networks -- if you have the ICs to handle it.

Re:This is an extremely important accomplishment.

[parlancex]

Programmer time is more expensive than hardware time. If a less efficient language is easier to use, it makes business sense to use it to save money. This does not explain the slow languages that are difficult to use, but it does explain why assembly has fallen from favor, and why C is in decline.

I honestly hate this idea. You write have to write a program once. Most programs run thousands of times, some programs will run millions or billions of times. If you actually calculated the global collective waste due to slow heavily abstracted languages running across the globe that cost is significantly than it would've been to write it properly to begin with.