[ Thanks to An Anonymous
Reader for this link. ]
“Over the last three years we’ve been hearing some
impressive claims about what the material graphene can do for the
future of processors. Graphene is a one-atom thick sheet of carbon
atoms that looks like a chicken coup-like mesh. IBM has demoed a
26GHz graphene-based transistor and MIT has unveiled a graphene
chip capable of a 1,000GHz suggesting it is the future and a
replacement for silicon.“But the latest news out of IBM is that graphene won’t replace
silicon completely. For it to do so graphene would have to be
capable of replacing the transistors used in processors. A
transistor needs to have two states: on and off. The problem is
that graphene does not have an off state and it cannot be switched
off completely. This means the energy state gap is very small
making it unsuitable for use as a transistor in a CPU at the
moment.”