Sunday, May 09, 2010

The Humble #2

clipped from hplusmagazine.com
Image Courtesy of: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene

All of these properties make graphene a very important material for the future of electronics. It has already been used to create field effect transistors, the primary component of a computer processor. When you combine this with the other features above, you have a single material that could be used for the majority of the components in every electronic device we currently have… with one major difference: speed. Current silicon based chips have a limited speed at which they can run at room temperature without overheating and malfunctioning. Go much over 3GHz without some major cooling and chips melt down. But replace those chips with graphene equivalents — without having made any other changes to the circuits -—and you can raise that limit much higher. Potentially 100 to 1000 times higher.   

Let’s think about that for a moment. That’s 300GHz to 3000GHz or 3Terahertz.