Graphene Is Grown with the Same Band Gap as Silicon | Hacker News Reader

Graphene Is Grown with the Same Band Gap as Silicon

spectrum.ieee.org

They don't mention whether the bandgap is direct or indirect? If the former, graphene could be used for IR LEDs / lasers as well.

Since Graphene has been heralded as the next wonder-material, can someone tell me in lay-mans terms how far off we are from seeing a graphene revolution in the personal electronics space when this tech becomes commercial?

Quite a while even with mass-production figured out. Graphene is a horrendous carcinogen and environmental hazard.

There are many scenarios in which GFNs can be toxic, yes. I wouldn't make any blanket statements about them however.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4803243/#!po=0....

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5088662/#!po=5....

Neither of those things are issues. Your regular run of the mill pencil is filled with “multi-layer graphene” aka graphite.

I always thought the Farnell -> Element14 rebranding was a bit shortsighted!

Why is graphene better than silicon?

Apparently, (much) smaller transistors can be made out of it, for better power efficiency and speed.

The article mentions using "standard lithographic techniques". Wouldn't it run into the same issues with extreme ultraviolet patterning that silicon fabs now face?

I don't know about lithography. Apparently suggested technologies for graphene are rather different.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/409449/graphene-transisto... — uses narrow (< 10nm) bands of graphene produced by ultrasound.

https://phys.org/news/2016-05-graphene-based-transistor-cloc... — uses some tech I did not understand to put two sheets of graphene very close by and control the tunneling.

Both mention 2-3 orders of magnitude speedup, compared to silicon.

Return to Moore's law?

This is very interesting, I didn't know!

Another reason is that it's abundant, and it goes without saying that it's a carbon sink. It's also an extremely flexible material, mechanically and otherwise.

Isn’t silicon extremely abundant? It makes up about a quarter of the Earth’s crust.

My impression is that you can do stuff with carbon that you can't do with silicon unless you dope with rare minerals. I could be wrong. Can someone elaborate who knows more about this than I do?

Good point, I forgot about the doping.

It is at least as abundant as carbon, but it's not found pure in nature and purifying it requires a lot more energy than carbon and is a lot dirtier.

among other things: ballistic conduction

Could you elaborate please?

"Ballistic conduction (ballistic transport) is the transport of electrons in a medium having negligible electrical resistivity caused by scattering. Without scattering, electrons simply obey Newton's second law of motion at non-relativistic speeds."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_conduction

I read this, had the hope someone could explain this a bit simpler :/

It means electrons travel without bumping into other particles.

Does this imply less power is needed?

There’s no resistance, so it’s almost like a superconductor. No power loss to heat.

BALLISTIC CONDUCTION

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