First functional graphene semiconductor could power future chips Researchers say they have discovered a way to produce semiconductors using graphene that could - at some stage further down the road - deliver high performance devices able to outmatch those made from silicon. Graphene has long held out promise as a potential material that could outperform silicon in terms of electron mobility …
Just read the paper, some excellent processes. I did a bit of Raman Spectroscopy during my time at Uni and one thing that always bugged me was - how do you know where you scanned? You don’t!
These guys have built a Raman map and were able to pinpoint and correlate the scans in a grid, which I can only imagine involved a far more rigorous process of marking off where you start at macro level and meticulously moving the substrate a tiny tiny amount using a servo: sadly not something I had available.
Also, well done for some excellent research, things have moved on since I was scanning SiC, it’s been a long time but well done, very pleased to see “we” are getting there! Just the trivial task of getting this all automated and then, you know, masking and getting the substrate into transistor shapes :-D
From what I can gather from the article (and I don't have the time or willpower to go and read the source paper), this is doped graphene on a silicon carbide substrate, and the SiC part is still required. I think if they could produce something to this effect with a scalable process and without involving silicon chemistry, this could really be a game changer. As I understand it, the large part of the complexity (and thus cost) of semiconductor production is the need to work with silicon, and silicon compounds, the chemistry of which is awkward, to say the least.
We've been able to build sub-nanometer IC's for decades now. The only problem is that they couldn't be mass produced and the cost would therefore have been prohibitive. If ASML hadn't invented their EUV machines only governments and the military would've been able to purchase low nanometer integrated circuits today.
So it begs the question: can they mass produce these graphene chips cheaply?
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