News Graphene transistor hits 300GHz

Would the efficiency of the transistor not have an effect on heat output? Or is all the energy lost as heat?

 

As we're moving towards stacking dies and 3D designs, though, it seems likely that we'll need a better way to conduct the produced heat away from the die, and that silicon isn't going to work there. Miniature watercooling has been proposed, but seems quite complex to get right

Whether graphene is the answer here I'm not sure, but it's most definitely an interesting material.

 

Synthetic diamond is getting cheaper and easier to produce, and conducts heat much, much better than copper and still better than graphene.

 

Well yeah, diamond is an even more perfect molecular carbon matrix than graphene, so that makes sense

On a sidenote, I still find it funny to see people express disbelief at the fact that diamonds can easily be burned

 

When did Yoda start writing for Bit-Tech???
SWEET!

 

Incase anyone is wondering what this actually is... its very similar to graphite. Where graphite has 3 bonds to other carbon atoms giving a 'spare bond' if you like. This leaves an unbonded electron which becomes free (delocalised). These bonds form sheets of one atom thick... Graphene is basically this however the sheets form tubes. If your interested check out "Buckminsterfullerene"... These are small balls of 60 atoms of carbon. They are formed in the same way and have been around since 1985! I hate to alarm you folks but this is still in research stages at Unis and its taken this long since they were discovered to produce anything useful! This is about 10 years from making production yet!

 

Noble Prize for Chemistry awarded to Bolton's first Nobel Prize winner (I'll be its second, obviously) Harold Kroto!

Buckyball <3

 

The problem here is that people are thinking "300GHz? Wow, my CPU only runs at 3.2GHz!".
Note that this graphene, according to the article, can achieve speeds twice as fast as normal silicon.

That means someone out there has been running silicon at 150GHz, or could if they wanted to (for single transistors, presumably) - Right, so why haven't we got CPUs at 150GHz yet? Because it ain't that simple.

That means in turn that just because a single Graphene transistor can run at 300GHz doesn't mean CPUs made from it will too.

Sure, it's great to see technological improvements and I'm not slagging off the article or the news itself at all here, but my excitement usually fades when I read these articles closely and see that it's yet another thing that won't leave the lab for another decade.

 

like every newcomer technology, it might not ever get developed going against such a well embedded and vested technology like silicone.

Simply put now silicone transistors are relatively well understood and the scientific and engineering hurdles to increase speed more palpable. Trying to go from nothing to a full graphene product would take decades of research and 100's of millions in research and development for something that might not even wash out.

 

http://www.nanotech-now.com/nanotube-buckyball-sites.htm

Pretty interesting.

 

Woudln't a Processer (unless the graphene can somehow negate the effects) at that speeds bloody hot and very power hungry?

 

According to the article, current Silicon based transistors can switch at roughly 150GHz.. Obviously these frequencies aren't used in ICs because it would get ridiculously hot... so I'm guessing that these Graphene based chips would not run at 300GHz... but could still probably run a lot faster than Silicon ICs, I'd imagine.

 

Individual transistor speed is largely useless in determining the clock speed of an entire circuit. That depends far more on the slowest component in the entire circuit, which limits throughput, and of course there's always communication latency for on-die traffic. A zero-latency, zero-leakage circuit could maybe run at 100 GHz or so. Of course, that's just a pipe dream