How Georgia Tech's new graphene semiconductor can revolutionize future computing

Scientists at the renowned Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA have developed a graphene semiconductor that has the potential to replace silicon in computer production. This has been dubbed the "Wright brothers moment" of computing by Dr. Walter de Heer, Regents' Professor of Physics at the university who led the research and development project.

Silicon, the current state-of-the-art of computing and electronics design, is already reaching its limit in terms of performance efficiency and scalability. Moore's law, which predicts computing performance will double every couple of years, has been projected to die by the middle of the decade.

The new graphene semiconductor material will allow for smaller and faster devices as compared to silicon. It could be the next step forward, allowing developers to push computing performance to never-heard-of levels.

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How Georgia Tech developed the graphene semiconductor and why it's a big deal

Graphene has been studied by researchers for over two decades now. According to Lei Ma, the director of Tianjin International Center for Nanoparticles and Nanosystems, the most crucial barrier to graphene's adoption in a nanoelectronics platform is the absence of "the right band gap and its inability to switch on and off at the correct ratio." Correct band gap formation was thus the key to success, and this project has succeeded in that regard.

Graphene is believed to be the next step in electronics (Image via Georgia Tech Research/YouTube)

De Heer has been studying 2D graphene since 2001, always believing it could be applied to electronics. According to him, the material can handle very large currents without "heating up and falling apart." Previously, his team developed a method to grow graphene on silicon carbide wafers with the help of special furnaces. By growing a single layer of the material on the crystal face of silicon carbide, they synthesized epitaxial graphene.

The first-ever graphene semiconductor has been developed using a "single sheet of carbon atoms held together by the strongest bonds known" to mankind. De Heer led a team at Georgia Tech and Tianjin University, China, for this groundbreaking development. According to him, the graphene semiconductor is now ten times as mobile as a silicon equivalent and has unique properties absent in the latter. The details of the research have been published in Nature.

"We now have an extremely robust graphene semiconductor with 10 times the mobility of silicon, and which also has unique properties not available in silicon." "But the story of our work for the past 10 years has been, 'Can we get this material to be good enough to work?'" - Walter de Heer

According to de Heer's team, the new graphene semiconductors have compatibility with existing silicon-based manufacturing processes, making them viable replacements. The research has been described as a "paradigm shift" in how electronics are done.

Scientists at Georgia Tech believe the new graphene semiconductors have applications in quantum computing, a field that works very differently from personal computer manufacturing.