We all are already well aware of the value of ‘Carbon’ as a building block of life itself. We owe our very existence to carbon and its miraculous property of linking itself up to form an unending chain; a property that is referred to as ‘Catenation’. While this wonderful ability of carbon has given us life and has even helped us sustain it, now we have finally found a way to integrate it in a huge way with our future. Carbon has been of immense use to man in innumerable ways starting from the plastic bags that you use (which will hopefully be out of use one day) to the carbon fiber bodywork of a Ferrari driven by Michael Schumacher. But now researchers such as Stephen Chou, professor of electrical engineering, and his team are making sure that it also becomes the building block of electronics.
For decades now silicon was the fundamental element on which all the electronic devices were built. The advent of silicon made devices stronger, smaller and they also lasted longer. Now Chou and his team claim that by replacing silicon with carbon they can make devices that are 10 times faster that those made out of silicon. This means not only greater efficiency but also smaller gadgets for the future. Considering how small all our accessories have got in the last few years, it is hard and equally exciting to think about where we can go further.
According to Chou, scientists have known since some time now that carbon would make electronic devices faster and more powerful. But the problem with integrating it in to practical tasks is the fact that we cannot extract a single layer of material called ‘Graphene’ of considerable width. Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice. But they cannot extract a single layer of Graphene with a width of more than a few millimeters while they need a layer of several inches to build electronic devices.
But Chow’s team has realized that a big Graphene wafer is not necessary, as long they could place small crystals of Graphene only in the active areas of the chip. They achieved this by extracting layers of Graphene from a graphite block by creating stamps that would stick to the surface when under cold conditions and would detach when heated. This allows the team to get layers of Graphene of several millimeters thickness and makes the process a lot easier. If all goes to plan then Chow expects to see carbon based gadgets hit the market in a few years time. Now that is indeed cool!
Source: Scienceblog
