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Comment by margorczynski | Hacker News Reader

The question is can this be as effectively processed and miniaturized as silicon. Still as someone pointed out they've already produced a transistor based on it and the claim is the same processes used for silicon can be used here so I sure hope it works out.

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Yep, we have much faster switching semiconductors than silicon based ones, but that is like 10% of the deal; there is also miniaturization techniques, fab equipment, engineer/scientist expertise in the subject, conductor/semiconductor/insulator layers & interfaces, and oh so much more. It's nice to hear about advancements outside the regular silicon ecosystem but it's a tough row to hoe to push silicon aside for a "better material". It's probably going to have to be a revolutionary advantage (100x?) improvement over current tech to move to a new tech stack.

Since density with Si is approaching a wall soon and thus a switch in materials likely to end up being necessary at some point in the next 2-3 decades anyway, I feel like rather than being immediately revolutionary, all that'll end up mattering is where the theoretical limits are. After all, at that point, you need to retool and retrain anyway.

Silicon based chips rely on oxide and metal layers to connect the transistors. Not clear to me from the article how that would work for graphene based devices. This was also an issue for GaAs based chips. From the Wikipedia article on GaAs

"The second major advantage of Si is the existence of a native oxide (silicon dioxide, SiO2), which is used as an insulator"

Carbon conductors to connect between layers, and carbon dielectric as insulators. Carbon all the way.

Even if it can't, ridiculously high current mosfets without heatsinks FTW.

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