Replacing Copper With Pencil Graphite 122
Late-Eight writes "A key discovery at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute could help advance the role of graphene as a possible heir to copper and silicon in nanoelectronics. Researchers believe graphene's extremely efficient conductive properties can be exploited for use in nanoelectronics. Graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon, eluded scientists for years but was finally made in the laboratory in 2004 with the help of everyday, store-bought transparent tape. The current research, which shows a way to control the conductivity of graphene, is an important first step towards mass producing metallic graphene that could one day replace copper as the primary interconnect material on nearly all computer chips." Researchers are now hot to pursue graphene for this purpose over the previous favorite candidate, buckytubes (which are just rolled-up graphene). Farther down the road, semiconducting graphene might take over from silicon at the heart of logic chips.
There are even more advantages (Score:5, Interesting)
This will allow for much more efficient cooling of electronics, even more then Silicon on Diamond technology that is just starting to come out.
Way back when.... (Score:5, Interesting)
My 'solution' involved opening up the keyboard and retracing the mylar sheet connections with a pencil. It worked great -- but I needed to crack it open every few weeks and retrace it.
It's amazing what you can accomplish when you are fairly clever and poor.
This might just work: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Way back when.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I knew that, and I wasn't brilliant. I think I learned it from my old 200-in-1 kit manual, or early lessons in "how to use your ohmmeter." I remember being instructed to draw a line with pencil, and then connect the ends at different lengths across the line. It recommended striping the line multiple times, as well, and to check the difference.
Re:Way back when.... (Score:5, Interesting)
pencils conduct electricity (Score:3, Interesting)
Another Use For Graphic & Electricity (Score:2, Interesting)
Would make for one hell of a motor? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Way back when.... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not as powerful as a modern Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (which is also 2x 2GHz, and I also own), and uses at least four times the power (and produces four times the heat), but I love it because I actually worked to build it instead of slapping together some parts.
Oh, and an interesting fact: A dual-cpu machine will run quite happily with two different speed cpus, but it screws up applications that use the rdtsc instruction as a timer unless they're constrained to a single cpu. Though the "/usepmtimer" boot.ini option could sort that one out.
Getting from silicon to carbon. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep. They need to cooperate with the silicon chip makers. And that's the really interesting bit...
Carbon can be a superresistor, a resistor, a semiconductor, or a conductor just by itself. The big, conjugated pi electron clouds you get above and below a graphite layer have lots of electrons in a single ground energy state, much like superconductivity. There are hopes that you can get some reduced dimension superconduction in carbon if you an up the electron density a bit. You may get this inside a buckytube where the curvature gives more electrons per unit volume.electron cloud is You could do this by rolling up a graphene into a buckytube. Then carbon could do the lot, electrically.
Fine. Carbon is clever stuff. However, we have spent a huge amount of time and effort on silicon. It is one small step on the periodic table, but one great leap for mankind. When we solder a device to a circuit board, there is a whole technology involved in getting from the submicron geometries and tiny singnals to the submillimeter sizes and microamp currents for things we can physically handle. We are going to need a new technology to go from the microscale of silicon to the nanoscale, quantum world of silicon. This could be thirty years of pouring research into new techniques before we ever get a useful device.
If, however, someone can come up with some way of using carbon on silicon, then we may be able to start working on practical carbon fabrication techniques and make them pay under much shorter timescales. I had always imagined the first application of carbon as some memory unit as memory usually involves banging out billions of copies of the same simple element, so the development costs in designing a single element are allowed to go higher than elsewhere. However, here is another option: we can deposit carbon onto an existing silicon surface - not as genuine epitaxy, but just using it as a flat surface, the way copper currently does. The next trick might be to get the film to roll itself into a buckytube. We have got the connections from silicon to carbon, and just the beginnings of practical self-assembly.
Whoo-hoo!