Graphene, the world's thinnest and toughest material, could spur the development of next generation computer chips, besides revolutionising materials science.Its amazing properties open the way to bendable touch screen phones and computers, lighter aircraft, paper thin HD TV sets and lightning-quick net connections, and more.
Graphene is an allotrope of carbon, whose structure is one-atom-thick planar sheets of sp2-bonded carbon atoms that are densely packed in a honeycomb crystal lattice or arranged in a hexagonal pattern resembling chicken wire. In graphite, many flat graphene sheets are stacked together.
The term graphene was coined as a combination of graphite and the suffix -ene by Hanns-Peter Boehm, who described single-layer carbon foils in 1962. Graphene is most easily visualized as an atomic-scale chicken wire made of carbon atoms and their bonds. The crystalline or "flake" form of graphite consists of many graphene sheets stacked together.Graphene transistor can execute 155 billion cycles per second,
which is about 50 percent faster than previous experimental transistors.
which is about 50 percent faster than previous experimental transistors.
The transistor has a cut-off frequency of 155GHz, making it faster and more capable than the 100GHz graphene transistor shown by IBM in February last year, said Yu-Ming Lin, an IBM researcher.
The flow of electrons is faster on graphene transistors than conventional transistors, which enables faster data transfers between chips. That makes it promising technology for applications such as networking that require communications at fast speeds and high frequencies.
Graphene transistors may be able compute faster than conventional transistors, but are not ideal for PCs yet. Because of the lack of energy gap in natural graphene, graphene transistors do not possess the on-off ratio required for digital switching operations, which makes conventional processors better at processing discrete digital signals.
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