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Carbon Microchips Accelerate Beyond Silicon

R. Colin Johnson | Date: 10-15-10 | Comments

Pioneering engineering efforts at Georgia Tech are bringing carbon microchips closer to commercialization by fabricating pure carbon sheets�graphene�into the world's largest carbon-transistor array.

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Carbon Microchips Accelerate Beyond Silicon
Researchers around the world are inventing ways to harness carbon�an organic material�to build smaller, faster microchips that sidestep the looming problems with inorganic silicon, which is becoming increasingly difficult to fabricate at the atomic level. IBM, for instance, recently demonstrated how to fabricate field-effect transistors (FETs) by smoothing out carbon into atomically thin sheets, called graphene.

Now the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) has advanced graphene one more step by inventing a "templated growth" technique for fabricating what they claim is the world's largest array of organic carbon-based graphene transistors.

Georgia Tech's new "templated growth" technique forces graphene sheets (black hexagons) to crystallize on contoured edges on a silicon carbide substrate (source: Georgia Tech).

Semiconductor researchers worldwide agree that pure carbon sheets of graphene are destined to enable the super-fast, ultra-high-density microchips of the future, but techniques for realizing that dream are all over the map. So far, the conventional chemical vapor deposition (CVD) techniques universally used to fabricate all silicon chips today�from Intel's iCore to USB flash drives�have not worked for graphene unless restricted to substandard wafers just of around an inch in area, compared with the 12-inch wafers used today for silicon chips.

Next: Technique Could Work with Any-Size Wafer >>