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Graphene to replace Silicon transistors
The University of Manchester (My Home City) have managed to carve transistors using the material Graphene one atom by 10 atoms in size.
Graphine is a one atom thick sheet which consists of a densely packed honeycomb crystal lattice. In basic terms under a microscope it is said to look like chicken wire! Simple.
By using this material they used a technique by chopping the honeycomb shaped material into quantun dots
“A quantum dot is a semiconductor whose excitons are confined in all three spatial dimensions. As a result, they have properties that are between those of bulk semiconductors and those of discrete molecules”
This gave a switchable conductivity which gave the graphene technique its transiting properties. By using this technique has Moore’s law been shattered? Will this process decrease the amount of transistors needed in microprocessing?
“Moore’s Law describes an important trend in the history of computer hardware: that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years. The observation was first made by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in a 1965 paper.The trend has continued for more than half a century and is not expected to stop for another decade at least and perhaps much longer.”
There are other techniques like the graphene implementation but the transistor run at such high temperatures a extreme method of using volatile gases for cooling has to be used.
The advantage of Graphene allows the transistors to work within room temperatures. The technique is so new and in prototype form that there is no current industrial production for the technology. Only time can tell the fait of Moore’s Law and the current transistor implementations.
Tags: Graphene, Transistors