There’s been growing interest in a material called graphene that could revolutionize the way a whole range of technologies look and work, from phones to tvs, body armour to testing blood. But just what is graphene and why is it so revolutionary? Internationally recognised graphene researcher Dr Francesca Iacopi from the Queensland Micro and Nanotechnology Centre explains more in sixty seconds.
Transcript
“Imagine your electronic portable devices even smaller, lighter, faster, flexible, with zero heat dissipation.
Imagine you can have them printed onto your glasses, onto your home or car windows, implanted into your skin, all communicating with you and each other to make an invisible and intelligent, interconnected network of ‘things’ that can sense and respond efficiently to the environment. Is this a distant imaginary future?
In fact this is already starting to become reality, also thanks to nanostructured materials.
One of these is graphene, the world’s strongest—and lightest—material. At just one atom thick, graphene is an ultra-thin carbon sheet stronger than steel but flexible, transparent, biocompatible and conducting electrical current and heat better than gold.
As scientists discover new ways to synthesize and harness graphene, prepare to be amazed.”
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I am very interested in the progress of graphene. Can you program it?
Signe Brewster’s article suggest that graphene can not use boolean logic.
“Because graphene can’t turn off the flow, Boolean logic doesn’t work. So the UC-Riverside researchers invented a different kind of logic that takes advantage of graphene’s unique properties. Instead of turning the flow of electrons on or off, they instead manipulated the voltage and current to represent different values. As a result, it doesn’t matter if the electrons are flowing constantly.”
Source: https://gigaom.com/2013/09/03/in-pursuit-of-graphene-based-electronics-researchers-rethink-their-logic/
Graphene and hexagonal boron nitride can be laminated and when they are, it becomes possible to control the direction of current flow with the application of an orthogonal magnetic field. This opens the possibility of current switching and other forms of logic processing, such as trinary and higher-order logics that conventional electronics has to deal with stepwise.
It also suggests that noise rejection might be much more efficient.
Correct, graphene does not have naturally an “OFF” state, so its use as an active material for electronics has constraints.
Said that, there are ways to introduce a small bandgap in graphene, and there are also ways to use graphene in a 2D electron/hole gas device. And of course, people will also look beyond Boolean logic for future applications.