The closer the world gets to technological processes around 1 nm, the more actively they say that very soon the industry will need a replacement for silicon. And it looks like scientists have created one new option: graphene.
More precisely, graphene itself has been known for many years, but scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology claim that they have created the world's first functional semiconductor from graphene. Despite many unique characteristics, using graphene in practice is not yet so easy. But after spending 10 years, scientists have created epitaxial graphene, which not only can be used for the production of semiconductors, but also uses current traditional methods of processing materials, which significantly increases the potential for commercialization of the technology.
A long-standing problem in graphene electronics is that graphene does not have the correct bandgap and cannot be turned on and off with the correct ratio. Over the years, many have tried to solve this problem with various methods.. Our technology achieves high bandgap and is a decisive step in realizing graphene-based electronics
Dr. Lei Ma
We now have an extremely strong graphene semiconductor that has 10 times the mobility of silicon and also has unique properties not found in silicon.
Walter de Heer, professor of physics at Georgia Tech
A breakthrough was achieved when a team of scientists figured out how to grow graphene on silicon carbide wafers using special furnaces. They created epitaxial graphene, which is a single layer of graphene growing on a crystalline silicon carbide face.. The team found that when properly fabricated, epitaxial graphene chemically bonded to silicon carbide and began to exhibit semiconducting properties.. Over the next decade, they continued to refine the material at Georgia Tech and then in collaboration with colleagues at the Tianjin International Center for Nanoparticles and Nanosystems at Tianjin University in China..