Graphene used to create world's smallest transistor

Now the Manchester team has shown that it is possible to carve out nanometre-scale transistors from a single graphene crystal. Unlike all other known materials, graphene remains highly stable and conductive even when it is cut into devices one nanometre wide.

Graphene transistors start showing advantages and good performance at sizes below 10 nanometres - the miniaturization limit at which the Silicon technology is predicted to fail.

"Previously, researchers tried to use large molecules as individual transistors to create a new kind of electronic circuits. It is like a bit of chemistry added to computer engineering", says Novoselov. "Now one can think of designer molecules acting as transistors connected into designer computer architecture on the basis of the same material (graphene), and use the same fabrication approach that is currently used by semiconductor industry".

"It is too early to promise graphene supercomputers," adds Geim. "In our work, we relied on chance when making such small transistors. Unfortunately, no existing technology allows the cutting materials with true nanometre precision. But this is exactly the same challenge that all post-silicon electronics has to face. At least we now have a material that can meet such a challenge."

"Graphene is an exciting new material with unusual properties that are promising for nanoelectronics", comments Bob Westervelt, professor at Harvard University. "The future should be very interesting".

Notes to editors

(1) One nanometre is one-millionth of a millimetre and a single human hair is around 100,000 nanometres in width.

A paper entitled "Chaotic Dirac Billiard in Graphene Quantum Dots" is published in April 17 issue of Science. It is accompanied by a Perspective article entitled "Graphene Nanoelectronics" by Westervelt. Copies of both are available on request.