Graphene to pave way for new generation of faster mobiles, computers

Engineers have paved the way for a new generation of faster, more powerful cell phones, computers and other electronics by developing a practical technique to replace silicon with carbon on large surfaces.The developers of this novel technique that harnesses the power of carbon for more powerful electronics are Princeton nanotechnologist Stephen Chou, professor of electrical engineering and graduate student Xiaogan Liang.Stephen Chou said that the capabilities of silicon, the material at the heart of computer chips, has been harnessed beyond its limits by engineers, and carbon has come up as an intriguing replacement for the same. The material called graphene which is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice, could let electronics to process information and produce radio transmissions 10 times better than silicon-based devices. However, switching from silicon to carbon has not been possible until now because technologists thought that they needed graphene material in the same form as the silicon used to make chips- a single crystal of material eight or 12-inches wide. Till date, the largest single-crystal graphene sheets made have not been wider than a couple millimeters, which is not big enough for a single chip. The researchers realized that a big graphene wafer is not needed, until they could place small crystals of graphene only in the active areas of the chip. A novel method was thus developed, in order to achieve this goal and demonstrated it by making high-performance working graphene transistors. "Our approach is to completely abandon the classical methods that industry has been using for silicon integrated circuits," said Chou. In the new method, the researchers made a special stamp consisting of a collection of tiny flat-topped pillars, each one-tenth of a millimeter wide. They pressed the pillars against a block of graphite (pure carbon), cutting thin carbon sheets, sticking to the pillars. The stamp was then removed, peeling away a few atomic layers of graphene.