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Friday, February 05, 2010

"CHIPS: IBM demos 100-GHz graphene transistor"

Its official--carbon transistors are faster, lower power and scale down without heating up, as demonstrated by the world's fastest graphene transistor. Look for carbon to replace silicon as the material of choice for electronic chips by the end of the decade. R.C.J.


A 100-GHz transistor has been demonstrated by IBM Research. Fabricated on new 2-inch graphene wafers and operating at room temperature, the RF graphene transistors are said to beat the speeds of all but the fastest GaAs transistors, paving the way to commercialization of high-speed, carbon-based electronics. IBM has patterned graphene transistors with a metal top-gate architecture (top) fabricate on 2-inch wafers (bottom) created by the thermal decomposition of silicon carbide. Almost four times faster than previous demonstrations, the graphene transistors were fabricated at the wafer scale using epitaxially grown graphene processing techniques that are compatible with those used to fabricate silicon transistors..
Full Text: http://bit.ly/9vqDlf