It has been said for quite sometime that silicon will soon reach its limit as computer chips become smaller and faster. Graphene – a crystalline form of carbon is hailed as a successor to silicon. However, when graphene based chip are made using conventional deposition techniques, they tend to degenerate and lose their two dimension hexagonal arrays perfect for fabricating electronic devices. Basically, with conventional deposition techniques graphene turns to graphite, which is of no use in electronic chips.

Penn State’s Electro Optics Center Materials (EOC) Division claims to have perfected a method called silicon sublimation that thermally removes silicon from silicon carbide wafers leaving behind pure graphene. Silicon sublimation method has been tried before to produce graphene, but EOC says that they have tweaked the process to produce larger 4-inch wafers, which wasn’t done before.
EOC claims that graphene chips can be 100-to-1,000 times faster than silicon chips and will enable more sensitive sensors, electronics, displays, solar cells and hydrogen storage devices. In theory, graphene chips can easily cross the 100GHz barrier, whereas silicon based chips are limited to 30GHz only.

EOC has already started working on 200mm (8-inch) wafer that can be used in standard chip fabrication equipment to produce graphene chips. Graphene is a very promising replacement for silicon in computer chips and chips based on graphene should come to the market in next 5-10 years.
[Via EE Times]