The Elements of Innovation Discovered
The Elements of Innovation Discovered
Metal Tech News - January 8, 2024
Researchers from Georgia Tech and Tianjin University believe their epitaxial graphene-based semiconductor could ignite a paradigm shift for the next generation of electronics.
Epitaxial graphene semiconductor on a silicon carbide chip.
Silicon, which has been the foundational material for computers and electronics over the past seven decades, is reaching its limits in terms of making the next generations of faster and smaller electronic devices. The creation of the world's first graphene semiconductor by a team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, however, could be the paradigm shift for the electronics of the 21st century.
"We kind of got lulled into thinking silicon is the end-all of electronics it's not – it's the beginning," said Georgia Tech Regents Professor of Physics Walter de Heer, who led a team of American and Chinese scientists that produced the graphene semiconductor.
While graphene has many superlative properties that make it a wonder material for many applications, including electronics, many scientists had written it off as a potential semiconductor for electronics because it lacked a "band gap," a crucial electronic property that allows semiconductors to switch on and off.
After more than two decades of working with graphene and spending the past decade working with the Tianjin International Center for Nanoparticles and Nanosystems at Tianjin University in China to perfect the 2D carbon material, de Heer and his colleagues have finally created a graphene semiconductor that is compatible with conventional microelectronics processing methods - a necessity for any viable alternative to silicon.
Their findings are outlined in"Ultrahigh-mobility semiconducting epitaxial graphene on silicon carbide," an article published in the scientific journal Nature on Jan. 4.
"This is really a paradigm shift; it is a different way of doing electronics," said de Heer.
De Heer's path to developing the graphene semiconductor of the 21st century began with an early career interest in carbon-based materials. This evolved to graphene, a 2D form of carbon.
"We were motivated by the hope of introducing three special properties of graphene into electronics," he said. "It's an extremely robust material, one that can handle very large currents, and can do so without heating up and falling apart."
In its natural form, graphene is neither a semiconductor nor a metal but a semimetal. To be a semiconductor, graphene needs a band gap that can be turned on and off when an electric field is applied to it, which is how all transistors and silicon electronics work.
The major question in graphene electronics research was how to switch it on and off so it can work like silicon.
The first breakthrough came when de Heer and his team worked out how to grow a single layer of graphene on silicon carbide wafers using special furnaces.
The resultant epitaxial graphene, which basically refers to graphene grown on a silicon carbide substrate, started to show semiconducting properties.
Over the next decade, Georgia Tech researchers persisted in perfecting the material and later in collaboration with colleagues at the Tianjin International Center for Nanoparticles and Nanosystems at Tianjin University in China.
"Our motivation for doing graphene electronics has been there for a long time, and the rest was just making it happen," de Heer said. "We had to learn how to treat the material, how to make it better and better, and finally how to measure the properties. That took a very, very long time."
Now, the team of American and Chinese scientists has succeeded in developing a graphene semiconductor with 10 times greater mobility than silicon. In other words, the electrons move with very low resistance, which, in electronics, translates to faster computing.
The Georgia Tech professor compares silicon and graphene's ability to transport electrons to "driving on a gravel road versus driving on a freeway."
"It's more efficient, it doesn't heat up as much, and it allows for higher speeds so that the electrons can move faster," the Georgia Tech physics professor added.
The researchers at Georgia Tech and Tianjin University believe their epitaxial graphene could ignite a paradigm shift in electronics that spawns new technologies that leverage the 2D wonder materials' superlative properties.
"A long-standing problem in graphene electronics is that graphene didn't have the right band gap and couldn't switch on and off at the correct ratio," said Lei Ma, director of the Tianjin International Center for Nanoparticles and Nanosystems and co-author of the epitaxial graphene paper. "Over the years, many have tried to address this with a variety of methods. Our technology achieves the band gap, and is a crucial step in realizing graphene-based electronics."
Catherine Barzler, a senior research writer and editor at Georgia Tech, wrote that the epitaxial graphene created by the team "allows the quantum mechanical wave properties of electrons to be utilized, which is a requirement for quantum computing."
De Heer sees the development of epitaxial graphene semiconductors as the next natural progression of electronics that began with telegraphs before evolving to vacuum tubes and silicon-based electronics.
"Graphene is the next step," he said. "Who knows what the next step is going to be after that but there is a good chance that graphene could take over and be the paradigm for the next 50 years."
With more than 16 years of covering mining, Shane is renowned for his insights and and in-depth analysis of mining, mineral exploration and technology metals.
Reader Comments(0)