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Information Technology News World's thinnest material yields semiconductor breakthrough
Information Technology News World's thinnest material yields semiconductor breakthrough | World's thinnest material yields semiconductor breakthrough |
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| by Stephen Withers | |
| Friday, 02 March 2007 | |
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The significance of the breakthrough is that graphene remains stable and conductive even in strips that are just a few nanometres wide. Silicon and all other known materials become unstable in strips a few tens of nanometres wide. Semiconductor companies currently use 45 nanometre silicon technology, so there is little room left for continued miniaturisation. Future electronic circuits can be carved out of a single graphene sheet. The Manchester technology is far from ready to go into production. "At the present time no technology can cut individual elements with nanometre precision. We have to rely on chance by narrowing our ribbons to a few nanometres in width," said lead researcher Leonid Ponomarenko. Andre Geim, director of the Manchester Centre for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology, suggests graphene-based circuits will not come into their own before 2025. He believes graphene is the only viable successor to silicon: "This material combines many enticing features from other technologies that have been considered as alternatives to the silicon-based technology," he said. "Graphene combines most exciting features from carbon-nanotube, single-electron and molecular electronics, all in one." Geim led the team that originally discovered graphene. The everyday forms of carbon are graphite (where the atoms are arranged in 'sheets' with weak bonds between the layers, giving rise to its lubricant properties) and diamond (where they form a regular and very strong crystal lattice). Researchers liken the arrangement of the atoms in graphene to chicken wire, but with a slight undulation in the third dimension that gives strength to the structure. Other possible applications for the material include improving the definition of electron microscope images, and separating gases with a molecular sieve.{moscomment}
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