Researchers have created the first chip made of graphene, a material that could transform computing

Researchers at Georgia Tech made… The world's first functional semiconductor made of grapheneIt is a single sheet of carbon atoms held together by the strongest bonds known.

Semiconductors, which conduct electricity under certain conditions, are essential components of all electronic devices.

The graphene chip comes at a time when silicon, the material from which almost all modern electronic devices are made, has become Up to max In the face of advances in increasingly faster computing and smaller electronic devices.

Walter de Heer, a professor of physics at Georgia Tech, led a team of researchers based in Atlanta, Georgia, and Tianjin, China, to produce a graphene semiconductor that is compatible with traditional microelectronics processing methods, which is essential for any viable replacement for silicon. .

In this latest research, published in the journal Nature, de Heer and his team have overcome a major hurdle that graphene research has faced for decades, known as… “Banned band”. This points to an important electronic property that allows semiconductors to turn on and off, which has not yet been found in graphene.

“We now have an extremely strong semiconductor graphene, with 10 times the mobility of silicon, which also has unique properties not available in silicon,” Hare said in a statement, the culmination of ten years of research for this project.

The challenge of graphene chip fabrication

In its natural form, graphene is neither a semiconductor nor a metal; Meanwhile, a band gap is a material that can be turned on and off when an electric field is applied to it, which is how all transistors and silicon electronics work. A major question in graphene electronics research has been how to turn it on and off so that it acts like silicon.

To make an effective transistor, a semiconductor material must be heavily processed, which can damage its properties. This means that The team needed to measure its electronic properties without damaging it To prove that their platform can serve as a viable semiconductor.

To do this, they put atoms in graphene that “donate” electrons to the system, a technique called doping, which is used to see if a material is a good conductor, and which works without damaging the material or its properties.

The team's measurements showed that graphene semiconductor has ten times greater mobility than silicon. In other words, Electrons move with very low resistance, which in electronics translates into faster computing. “It's like driving on a gravel road versus driving on the highway,” De Heer said, adding: “It's more efficient, it doesn't get as hot, and it allows for higher speeds so the electrons can move faster.”

The team's product is currently the only 2D semiconductor with all the properties needed for use in nanoelectronics, and its electrical properties far exceed those of any other 2D semiconductor currently in development.

Epitaxial graphene can cause a A paradigm shift in electronics and enabling entirely new technologies that take advantage of their unique properties. In this context, a notable detail is that the material allows the use of quantum mechanical wave properties of electrons, which is one of the requirements for quantum computing.