Early in the semiconductor industry, Gordon Moore made his famous prediction that the number of transistors on an IC would double every year through 1975. Today’s chips have over one billion transistors. Innovation with silicon, however, can no longer extend Moore’s Law. New technology needs to replace silicon to continue developing more advanced, smaller, cost-effective semiconductors. Twisted bilayer graphene could extend Moore’s Law.
A major impetus for the development of 2D materials is the replacement of silicon in integrated circuits (ICs), which is reaching the limits of shrinking gate and channel sizes. Below a few nanometers, silicon transistor performance exhibits severe deterioration due to carrier scattering.
In 2004, Drs. Novosleov and Geim at the University of Manchester proved that a single atomic layer of a substance could exist in a stable state and introduced a single atomic layer of carbon, designated as graphene. They initiated the field of 2-dimensional (2D) material research. Studies of graphene yielded significantly superior performance compared with silicon and the hope that graphene transistors could extend Moore’s Law.
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