Graphene steps up to silicon's challenge

The latest contender to succeed silicon's throne is graphene. It has been used to make a truly tiny transistor that works at room temperature, offering hope for making faster, smaller electronics devices once silicon reaches its limits.

Graphene is a two-dimensional form of carbon, discovered just three years ago. It is very thin—just one atom thick—and highly conductive with minimal resistance, which has sent physicists and materials scientists into a frenzy to find applications that exploit these properties.

Andre Geim at The University of Manchester, UK, and colleagues made a device etched out of a sheet of graphene that acts as a single electron transistor (SET). The device has a tiny restriction, less than 10 nanometres wide, which can hold a single electron. If an electron is held and trapped here it creates what is known as a Coulomb blockade—no electrons can flow through the device when this electron is in the way.

According to Geim, of all materials invistigates so far, graphene has the most realistic promise to one day replace silicon chips.

From Nature