“The industry needs a new transistor, a new device”, reckons Dr Dwight Decker, Chairman of the Global Semiconductor Alliance and Chairman of Conexant, “we’ve been lucky to put it off for 20 years. We need something to reduce the cost of manufacturing dramatically, maybe a completely new material.”
Up in Manchester, the birthplace of computing, such a material exists - graphene.
Graphene could get the chip industry back on the old virtuous circle of: shrink = less power = higher performance, which started to run out of steam at 90nm. Nowadays, although the new process nodes deliver smaller transistors, they do not, of themselves, deliver higher performance.
That means that a new generation of industry products is not so compelling to prospective purchasers as it used to be. And explains why the industry’s profit margins have been narrowing.
Hence Decker’s plea for a new device or a new material.
Graphene could be it, but how do you work a material which is one atom thick?
“Unfortunately, no existing technology allows the cutting of materials with true nanometer precision”, says one of the discoverers of graphene, Professor Andre Geim, “but this is exactly the same challenge that all post-silicon electronics has to face. At least we now have a material that can meet such a challenge."
“"In our work, we relied on chance when making such small transistors”, said Geim who has made a transistor 10 atoms wide, with the thickness of a sheet of graphene which is 1 atom.
“Previously, researchers tried to use large molecules as individual transistors to create a new kind of electronic circuit. It is like a bit of chemistry added to computer engineering," says graphene co-discoverer Dr Kostya Novoselov, "now one can think of designer molecules acting as transistors connected into designer computer architecture on the basis of the same material (graphene), and use the same fabrication approach that is currently used by semiconductor industry."
TOMORROW: TEN BIGGEST US HIGH-TECH R&D SPENDERS
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