HPCwire: Graphene Transistors Promise Life After Silicon

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March 02, 2007

Graphene Transistors Promise Life After Silicon

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Researchers have used the world's thinnest material to create the world's smallest transistor – a breakthrough that could spark the development of a new type of super-fast computer chip.

Professor Andre Geim and Dr Kostya Novoselov from The School of Physics and Astronomy at The University of Manchester, reveal details of transistors that are only one atom thick and less than 50 atoms wide, in the March issue of Nature Materials.

They believe this innovation will allow the rapid miniaturisation of electronics to continue when the current silicon-based technology runs out of steam.

In recent decades, manufacturers have crammed more and more components onto integrated circuits. As a result, the number of transistors and the power of these circuits has roughly doubled every two years. This has become known as Moore's Law.

But the speed of cramming is now noticeably decreasing, and further miniaturisation of electronics is to experience its most fundamental challenge in the next ten to 20 years, according to the semiconductor industry roadmap.

Two years ago, Professor Andre Geim and his colleagues discovered a new class of materials that can be viewed as individual atomic planes pulled out of bulk crystals.

These one-atom-thick materials and particularly graphene – a gauze of carbon atoms resembling a chicken wire – have rapidly become one of the hottest topics in physics.

The first graphene-based transistor was reported by The University of Manchester team at the same time as the discovery of graphene, and other groups have recently reproduced the result (1).

But these graphene transistors were very 'leaky' (2), which has limited possible applications and ruled out important ones, such as their use in computer chips and other electronic circuits with a high density of transistors.

Now the Manchester team has found an elegant way around the problem and made graphene-based transistors suitable for use in future computer chips.

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