Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice, and it's part of the larger family of carbon allotropes.
First unambiguously produced and identified in 2004, this unique material has garnered significant attention due to its exceptional properties.
Graphene is an excellent conductor of electricity, incredibly strong yet lightweight than steel at comparable thicknesses, highly resistant to heat and acids, and possesses remarkable thermal conductivity. Its unique properties make it a promising material for various applications, ranging from electronics and energy storage to materials science and even medical devices.
As researchers are exploring ways to harness graphene's potential in creating more efficient batteries, flexible electronic devices, and even advancements in medical technology, it's reported that researchers have successfully created a working, scalable semiconductor has been created from graphene for the first time.
This has the potentially of paving the way for a new type of computer with greater speed and efficiency than modern-days silicon chips.
While graphene is indeed exceptionally good in being a conductor, a working graphene semiconductor, which can be controlled to conduct or insulate electricity at will, lacks what's called the 'bandgap'.
Semiconductors have bands of higher and lower energies and a point - known as a bandgap - at which excited electrons can hop from one to the other. This effectively allows switching on and off, creating the binary system of zeroes and ones used in digital computers.
Such semiconducting property is key in creating the logic chips that power computers.
In numerous researches before this, graphene can be made to act like a semiconductor, but only a smaller scale, it had never been scaled-up to sizes that would make a computer chip practical.
Previous work has shown that wrinkles, domes and holes in graphene sheets can have unusual effects on electrical flow, creating the possibility that logical chips could be made by creating the right landscape of flaws.
This is why graphene, with its remarkable properties, may never be able to replace silicon chips any time soon.
And probably, ever replacing silicon entirely.
But Walter de Heer from Georgia Tech and his colleagues claimed to have created graphene with such a bandgap that can demonstrate a working transistor. Their process should be more conducive to scaling-up because it relies on techniques not dissimilar to the creation of silicon chips.
The team used wafers of silicon carbide that were heated, to then forced the silicon to evaporate before the carbon, in order to leave just a layer graphene on top.
In a statement, it's said that the electrical properties of this graphene semiconductor were far better than those of silicon chips.
"It’s like driving on a gravel road versus driving on a freeway," Walter de Heer said. "It's more efficient, it doesn't heat up as much, and it allows for higher speeds so that the electrons can move faster."
But again, despite graphene being a marvel of material science with a wide range of possibilities, and can even help with the development of quantum computing, at this time at least, more research is needed, which include the understanding of transistor size, quality and manufacturing techniques
First of, the material is relatively new and that it's also expensive to make. In comparison, silicon is already widely used, and cheap to manufacture, even at a global scale.
Research into discovering new materials to replace silicon is needed because humanity is reaching the limits of what these chips can do.
Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors in a circuit will double roughly every two years, but the rate of miniaturization has slowed in recent years as engineers reach circuit densities beyond which electrons cannot be reliably controlled.
And here, researchers suggest that graphene could reinvigorate progress.