IBM Graphene IC Is World's First

It's been 7 years since the inception of the material which has taken all the engineers and researchers by storm. The material is '#-Link-Snipped-#'. Graphene is expected to make laptops, tablets and mobile phones smaller than ever before and also equip with much for functionality than ever imagined. Few hours ago, IBM engineers announced another breakthrough in the field of Integrated Circuits. IBM has been successful in developing the world's first Graphene based IC. According to a paper published in Science, engineers were successful in using Graphene - a material made of a single layer of carbon atoms to build an integrated circuit.

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Source: IBM

Graphene was invented byAndre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov and the duo won the Nobel Price in 2010 for isolating the material in 2004. The material is of special interest to scientists and researchers not just because of the size but also its ability to transfer information. The structure of carbon in Graphene enables the material to have very high electron mobility. This property is expected to bring a revolution in the communications domain. Earlier, Graphene was used as bulky electric components and different parts were connected through wires. However for the first time, IBM was able to create an IC using Graphene. IBM achieved a remarkable success in using Graphene in IC that is 1 square millimeter in size. The circuit is designed to function as a frequency mixer.

“This work is a milestone,” says Alexander Balandin - head of the Nano-Device Laboratory at University of California Riverside. He further adds, Graphene has one major drawback at present. Graphene can't be turned off completely. Turning off Graphene is very important as data is currently sent in the form of 1s and 0s aka on and off states respectively. “The holy grail would be if you could integrate graphene into the CPU,” he says. It hasn’t been done yet, but this week graphene may be one step closer to the digital world.

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