Silicon has long reigned as the material of choice for the microchips that power everything in the digital age, from AI to military drones — so much so that “silicon” is almost a synonym for tech itself.
It’s anyone’s guess how long that will last. Silicon chips have been bumping against the limits of miniaturization for years, dividing chip makers on whether Moore’s law, the longstanding assumption that transistors will steadily get smaller and computers more powerful, is already dead.
But the global semiconductor industry is still under just as much pressure to produce ever more powerful chips, and keep up the pace of technological progress. It’s no surprise there’s been a growing frenzied interest in novel 2D materials that can pick up where silicon leaves off. They promise advantages over silicon — higher electrical conductivity, better temperature control, the ability to use less energy — that could, possibly, keep that decades-long momentum going.
Enter graphene. This month, researchers at Georgia Tech and China’s Tianjin University made a breakthrough in one of the top contenders for a silicon alternative — graphene, the one-atom-thick form of carbon that won a Nobel Prize in 2010. Georgia Tech physicist Walt de Heer and his team created the world’s first functional graphene-based semiconductor, marking what he dubbed a “Wright brothers moment” for the next-generation materials that could make up the electronic devices of the future.
“The silicon industry is completely reliant on the fact that you can make incredibly large single crystals,” de Heer told DFD, referring to the first step of microchip creation. “We’re at the level of basically having a crystal that you can start the entire [graphene] industry with.”
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