Graphene: Next To Provide 1THz

Imagine that in 6 years or so, chips inside our mobiles (or the devices at that time) will have clock cycles of 1THz (1,000 GHz = 1,000,0000 MHz etc), in other words, enough power to serve half of the request made to Facebook just into our hands, could you??

Few years ago, there have been investigations about the use of graphene as a material for the creation of chips, processors and all kinds of electronic circuits. Until now it was known that this particular material, consisting of a monatomic mesh of carbon atoms, is able to withstand amazing transfer speeds, making it the ideal replacement for silicon.

If the possibility for a graphene chip to reach 1THz frequency range is no longer attractive by itself, now scientists has discovered a second quality also fascinating. At the University of Illinois, researchers have found that graphene is not only hot, but has the ability to 'self cooling'. Words from Wikipedia:

Graphene is a flat monolayer of carbon atoms tightly packed into a two-dimensional (2D) honeycomb lattice, and is a basic building block for graphitic materials of all other dimensionalities. It can be wrapped up into 0D fullerenes, rolled into 1D nanotubes or stacked into 3D graphite

One of the biggest problems of graphene is the structure within reaches the field of nanotechnology. Mononuclear thickness makes it particularly difficult to manipulate and measure. For the first time, a team of researchers led by physicist and engineer William King Eric Pop systems have measured the temperature of a grid of graphene using an atomic force microscope and a temperature sensor suitably adapted. From the document above:

The current crowding effect generates resistive heating along the graphene–metal contact, as explored below. The thermoelectric effect at the graphene–metal interface can result in heating or cooling along the contacts, depending on the direction of current flow and the sign of the Seebeck coefficient S.

In more human words, the results of these measurements were quite unexpected. Graphene seems to lose heat more rapidly than it accumulates, which means that the material not only stays cold for huge amounts of current applied, so that loss of heat could be harnessed to generate more electricity as well.

Discovery opens the door to a whole new world of possibilities when designing high-density chips ultrafast but hot. Until now, graphene was extremely complicated and expensive to create because they had to remove nanosheets from common graphite (the material from pencils) On the other hand, the technology of extraction of this material has come a long way and already have much cheaper costs. It is too early to talk about graphene mass production, nonetheless it appears that this curious material could flow in a new technological era.