This is the world's first graphene semiconductor device jointly launched by Tianjin University and Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States, and has been successfully applied to radio radio. Let's take a look at what's so amazing about this amazing chip.
"New invention!" Yesterday afternoon, the information of the science and technology channel suddenly popped up such a news, which was shocking. It turned out that the scientific giants of China and the United States have emerged again, and they have successfully come up with a new thing called "graphene functional semiconductors". The semiconductor has already quietly made its debut in the top academic journal Nature. This great discovery has a significant impact on the future of our world. Let's talk about this in detail.
First of all, what is a graphene functional semiconductor? In fact, graphene is placed on the substrate of silicon carbide, and then processed by some special methods to finally obtain graphene with semiconductor characteristics. This is equivalent to opening a new door for graphene, making it theoretically a member of the semiconductor material. Graphene already has excellent quality, and if it can be commercialized, it will undoubtedly produce a revolutionary wave for the future chip industry. Someone has tried to make graphene semiconductors before, but it failed because it could not turn off and on the current. This is because graphene itself does not have just the right energy gap.
However, this dilemma has now been cleverly solved by a team of researchers from China and the United States. They successfully solved this problem by using a technique called "quasi-balanced annealing", which allows graphene to drive the current quickly and steadily. What's more worth mentioning is that this technology allows graphene to leapfrog the threshold of semiconductor characteristics without making mistakes. In this way, graphene can theoretically become a commonly used semiconductor material. It has the characteristics of very good mobility and strong heat dissipation capacity, and can improve its processing efficiency in fields with great potential for application such as artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. Ever thought it was cool?
Prior to this, IBM launched the world's first graphene integrated circuit in 2011 and used it to make radio radios. Although this circuit worked well, they still failed to solve the common problem of silicon-based semiconductors - too large energy gap. However, graphene functional semiconductors are like highways where these sounds travel through the air, while those inefficient semiconductors, such as silicon-based semiconductors, can only be regarded as curved and narrow gravel paths. Graphene functional semiconductors can reach transmission speeds of up to 5 kilometers per second, which is ten times faster than current silicon-based semiconductors and nearly twice as fast as other types of two-dimensional semiconductors. If this technology can be generalized, all the problems that existed before will be gone, and people will not have to worry about Moore's Law being broken in the future.
In the 60s of the 20th century, when the computer was born, Gordon Moore, the leader of Intel Corporation, made a decisive prediction, he believed that as long as semiconductor processing technology continues to develop, the processing speed of computers will double every two years. This law is known as "Moore's Law". It can be said that it is an earth-shattering shock, and now our computer chip technology is developed according to the prediction of this law. Now our electronic parts are getting smaller and smaller, and the whole chip is getting smaller, but their operating frequency is growing rapidly, all because Moore's Law shows us the way.
The emergence of this graphene functional semiconductor undoubtedly gives us a new hope. It not only overcomes the bottleneck of graphene materials, but also greatly improves its semiconductor characteristics, which is of great significance for the development of the semiconductor industry in the future. It is expected that this "new understanding" of graphene functional semiconductors can bring more convenience to our lives.