Graphene.Posted on 04/07/2014 11:23:16 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Graphene is slated as the major breakthrough of this century. Infact it could very well propel the semiconductor a couple of decades easily (compared to the performance trend via Moore’s law ). Graphene transistors are more than capable of being clocked at 500Ghz so you get the idea of what Samsung is claiming to have achieved: a replicateable production process of Graphene nodes.
Graphene.
OK, I admit, I was being slightly sarcastic when I wrote the headline. It seems sort of ironic that if Samsung’s claims turn out to be true then the first Graphene processors will be in future wearable devices instead of lets say, desktop computers. Of course, Samsung can be forgiven for saying this considering its a primarily mobile company after all, but it still stings to a PC Enthusiast like me. Graphene, aka the miracle material of the century, to be used in future smart watches; seems like an extract from Douglas Adam’s Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Anyways, enough of my rant. On with the specifics.
This breakthrough was claimed at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology and Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea. Basically they used a common silicon wafer with Germanium substrate to manufacture a mono layer mono crystal Graphene impression on top of it and then remove the silicon wafer (and germanium) from below. The silicon wafer can then be reused which is pretty great. Also since the Graphene is removed from the germanium using a completely dry process the Graphene is completely wrinkle free which basically means that the construction of the crystal is completely clean and low in defects. Since both the germanium substrate and silicon wafer can now be reused ( in previously known production processes the germanium substrate had to be burned off) it will exponentially increase, mass production capabilities. Samsung has started production of Graphene Field Effect Transistors (gFET)
* by CPUs I mean SoCs, but that didn’t sound so poetic up there.
...graphene transistors ibm circuits ....
IBM researchers just built the best graphene-based circuit yet: it sends text messages
Just my casual impression that in the past every story about graphene was a story about IBM research. Then out of the blue ( to me ) Samsung starts prototype production of a product.
I remember wafers.. rows and rows of ‘em.. those wafer testers were a bugger sometimes.
The whole Globe has been working on researching Graphene.
See my uodates...links.
Incorrect. Not Area 51, Apollo 22.
Good.
Someone can correct me if I’m wrong but I think the Intel limitation is thermal. Faster clock rates increase dissipation so there is a natural practical limit to the clock speed.
Wow. Thanks much.
Back later.
agreed
starting to get interesting
the real question then becomes, what do you do with it? games? analysis? simulators? monitoring? proper AI?
we’ll still have issues with storage being dead slow... unless this tech opens doors to new storage mediums that store one bit per molecule ... addressable? SSDs at a molecular level and at 500GHz speeds? storage and memory become the same
“It’s becoming obvious mankind didn’t invent any of this stuff. This is clearly stuff being reverse-engineered from the Area 51 spacecraft.”
Along with Emacs and Lisp.
:-)
The wife and I went almost exclusively Samsung in our home. Our first plasma TV was a Samsung. Our fridge, oven, microwave, washer, and dryer are all Samsung.
IIRC, in the early 2000s, they brought on a huge R&D group that was eventual absorbed into them, and they've been making amazing products since.
IBM is using graphene for development right now. Samsung’s been leading the industry in new tech stuff with graphene, and this is apparently some of their labor’s fruit.
SEVERAL orders of magnitude. At this point, they're just fiddling with the matrix, meaning the wafers that go into semiconductors. Once they start stacking them and applying current, look out!
The current standard is 22 nm for processors, for instance. There's a finite number of wafers that can be crammed into a 22 nm space, and we're getting around 4 GHz consistently on newer chips.
If their numbers are correct, 500 GHz over a platter would mean multi-core processors with hundreds if not thousands of "cores" all computing at several hundred gigahertz. That's just at a server/desktop hardware level, which would be considered "macro." The excitement is coming in the form of mobile and even microprocessing power where your current iPhone/Android could be shrunk in thickness down to that of a piece of paper with processing power much higher than currently available. Wearable tech is also a possibility.
Interesting article. Perhaps what Samsung is doing in this wafer fabrication process shall pane out nicely for them.
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