Graphene to make computers work 1,000 times faster
Imagine computers that could work 1,000 times as fast as they do now – and touchscreens that didn’t break when your phone gets knocked out of your hand and clatters onto the pavement. Researchers from a group of American universities think they may be about to revolutionise the world of electronics – thanks to a form of carbon known as graphene.
Graphene is a single layer of graphite just one atom thick, and was discovered in 2004 when two physicists at the University of Manchester decided to peel off thinner and thinner layers from a slab of graphite using sticky tape. Graphite is a good conductor of heat and electricity, due to its unpaired electrons and the weak bonds between the atoms, but the fact that it is made of layers stacked on top of one another impedes its conductivity somewhat.
Graphene, being a single layer, doesn’t have this problem. It can conduct electricity faster than any other known substance – 250 times better than silicon at room temperature – and conducts heat ten times better than copper, which is the most commonly used conductor in electronics. It’s also stronger than steel; so strong that, if you had a piece of graphene with the thickness of clingfilm, you’d have to balance an elephant on a pencil point to concentrate enough force to pierce it.
All these superproperties mean graphene has a number of potential uses. It could be used to make transistors which, the scientists believe, could work 1,000 times faster than those we have now, while at the same time using just one hundredth of the power. The team of US researchers – from Northwestern University, the University of Texas at Dallas, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Central Florida – have already developed a graphene transistor.
Traditional silicon transistors, which act as switches or amplifiers in electrical circuits, revolutionised electronics with their ability to switch current on and off and allowed the development of radios, televisions and computers. But silicon transistors haven’t been getting any faster since about 2005 and, as one of the researchers, University of Central Florida professor Ryan M Gelfand, explained, that’s not good enough.
“If you want to continue to push technology forward, we need faster computers to be able to run bigger and better simulations for climate science, for space exploration, for Wall Street,” he said. “To get there, we can’t rely on silicon transistors anymore.” Graphene transistors would also be smaller and more efficient, allowing technology to be smaller and do more.
Another potential use is in phone and tablet touchscreens – the top layer of a touchscreen needs to be a good conductor of electricity so the device can sense your fingertip. Indium tin oxide, used at the moment, is both rare and brittle (hardly ideal for something which tends to take as much of a battering as most people’s phones). Graphene could also replace graphite or other forms of carbon in anything from tyres to batteries to increase their strength or conductivity.
However, unless you want to spend your days peeling pencils apart with bits of sellotape, graphene is still quite hard to create, so its widespread use in computers is still a far-off possibility. But, with a bit more progress, it could be the key to, as the researchers put it, “a transformative generation of energy-efficient computing.”
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