IBM has seen the future of computing and it may not involve silicon. Instead the company has been looking at graphene, the single atom-thick sheets of carbon that has materials scientists entranced by its dazzling array of amazing properties.
If graphene ever becomes the material of choice for a new generation of superfast chips, then the work of Yu-Ming Lin and buddies at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in upstate New York may well turn out to be one of the foundations of that revolution.
Today, they say they’ve built the high quality graphene transistors and clocked them running at 26 GHz.
That doesn’t quite knock silicon off its perch–the fastest silicon transistors are an order of magnitude faster than that but the record is held by indium phosphide transistors which have topped 1000 GHz.
Still, 26 GHz isn’t bad for the new kid on the block. It took silicon 40 years to get this far. By contrast, the first graphene transistor was built only last year.
As the team puts it: “The work represents a significant step towards the realization of graphene-based electronics.”
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0812.1586: Operation of Graphene Transistors at GHz Frequencies
I’d love to comment on the contents of your article, but I cannot read it. Light grey on white? Get a clue.
Now all we need to do is make sure that these:
1)Can be produced cheaply
2)revamp our OS’s to utilize these new chips
3)Get motherboard makers to build for the new chips.
4)Don’t let a better alternative come along (1000Ghz 0.o)
If you simply select all the text with you mouse it turns black… much easier to read.
You do know that this has nothing to do with speed and everything to do with money? $$$ is spent on research for tax purposes… If you get lucky, well so be it. Then you make more money. SPEED is not really an issue anymore.
Ummm turn your contrast and brightness down a bit man.
Ctrl-+ should increase the font under Firefox as well.
I wonder what the difficulties are in getting this to fabricate compared to GaAs, SiGe, and InP. I would suspect that Graphene is probably a serious contaminant to most fab lines.
The fastest silicon transistors are an order of magnitude quicker, but they also have gates at least an order of magnitude shorter. Depends just how the scaling goes.
[…] del centro TJ Watson Research que IBM tiene en Nueva York, han logrado que un transitor de grafeno opere a frecuencias de 26 GHz , lo que según sus responsables, “es un paso importante en la aplicación del grafeno en la […]
[…] информации: The physics arXiv |Источник: […]
try a pair of glasses 🙂
This is very interesting, but it seems like every day I read in the news somewhere about how graphene, or buckyballs, or carbon nano-SOMETHINGs are being used in some new revolutionary and amazing way, but I never see anything come of it at this point.
For example there was a story about carbon nano-tubes being useful in creating super-capacitors, which would be really great for charging electric autos maybe, but nothing comes on the market from this.
When is this technology actually going to make something?
Carbon is in the same valence group as Silicon, so I’m thinking it could be used with Silicon without contaminating it as sodium or other elements might, although the size difference could create a crystal defect and mess things up that way.
[…] lo que permitió que el jueves pasado se anunciara la creación de transistores basados en grafeno corriendo a 26 GHz, logrando en un año lo que costó cuarenta usando […]
sorry you’re blind buddy, but it looks fine to me.
[…] Hier der Originalartikel. […]
[…] with replacing/supplementing silicon with other materials like graphene. One such experiment (http://arxivblog.com/?p=755) yielded a 26 GHz clock speed. Other silicon chips have been known to have a clock speed of about […]
Oi Bruce, we didn’t invent the wheel and then suddenly build a Ferrari. Progress takes a while!
I agree with nicemandan progress takes a while. More than a while some years or even decades. I find graphene great and a step towards the future of making things faster and able to store more memory. Also great opportunities for electronics engineers to find a way to produce graphene for transistors. Whoever does it will make a buttload of money. We operate in Ghz now imagine achieving speeds of Thz, that’s ridiculous.