Scientists have learned how to create metallized graphene wires

For decades, silicon has been the absolute hegemon in electronics manufacturing. But time is passing, and the potential of silicon is already practically exhausted. That is why scientists around the world are actively looking for an alternative that will allow electronics to develop at the same high rate.

Such an extremely promising material is graphene, from which a Californian research group in Berkeley created metal graphene tapes that can replace conventional wires in all-carbon electronics. I’ll tell you about this discovery now.

Graphene, silicon and Moore's law

There is a rather curious Moore's law, according to which the rate of technological progress, and, therefore, the number of transistors on a computer chip must double almost every two years.

And so it has been for several decades, but recently this process has begun to slow down greatly. And all because we just began to approach the physical limit of the capabilities of silicon itself.

An excellent option for replacing silicon and obeying Moore's Law is readily available and very cheap carbon, especially if the entire carbon-shaped scheme becomes achievable.

So diamond, graphite, and carbon tubes are all forms of carbon that have already proven to be highly effective in electronics.

But the most promising at the moment, of course, is graphene - a carbon lattice with a thickness of only one atom. Moreover, it can be in the most diverse forms: a flat sheet, a ball of crumpled sheets, miniature quantum dots and the thinnest and at the same time very long nano-ribbons.

The team is from the University of California and has focused on nano tapes.

New device made of graphene ribbons

Under normal conditions, graphene nanoribbons are excellent semiconductors. But in the course of numerous experiments, the engineering group managed to make a real breakthrough, namely, it turned out to create metallized ribbons from semiconductor tapes.

So, according to one of the authors of the study, the ability to create ultra-thin metal wires from graphene without the need for additional alloying is a breakthrough.

In order to obtain such tapes, engineers literally sewed them together and, thanks to the temperature effect, was launched chemical process, which made it possible to create nanoribbons several tens of nanometers long and a modest 1.6 nanometer.

After the completion of the splicing process and heat treatment, it was found that the ribbons were now endowed with the electronic properties of metal. Moreover, as experience has shown, each segment brought only one electron into the overall circuit.

The scientists did not stop there, and it was decided to make small adjustments to one atomic bond out of 100, which made it possible to increase the so-called metallicity of the ribbon by 20 times.

In fact, this discovery is difficult to overestimate, because it is a very important step for the creation of all-carbon electronics of the future.

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