Seminar on Graphene: The Ultimate Switch

Contents
About transistors Electrons can be made to bend and bounce What can we do with this light- mimicking behavior? How Graphene works? Reconfigurable logic Honey comb like lattice of hexagons Creating artificial bandgap. Moore's law Gate test Conclusion References

About Transistor
From the outside, transistors seem so simple and straightforward. But inside, they're actually a mess. Electrons moving through even the best transistor channel can't go in straight lines. Instead they're buffeted continually by a host of imperfections and vibrations, which together put a strict limit on speed and generate a lot of heat in the process.

Electrons can be made to bend and bounce

The good news is that it doesn't have to be that way. By a quirk of quantum mechanics, electrons moving through atom-thick sheets of carbon known as graphenedon't suffer much at all from these sorts of collisions. Instead, they behave like massless particles, speeding along in straight lines for long distances just like photons do. And just like light, these electrons can be made to bend or bounce back when they move from one medium to another.

Well, here's what we'd like to do: Replace the logic circuitry at the heart of every computer processor. After 50 years of steady miniaturization, chipmakers have just about shrunk the device to its limits. we know that to continue making faster, cheaper, and more energy efficient chips, we'll need a new technology.

What can we do with this lightmimicking behavior?

How Graphene works?

Graphene logic will be extraordinarily fast. Instead of manipulating information by turning the flow of current on and off through a transistor channel, graphene logic could perform calculations by bending, reflecting, focusing, and defocusing electrons moving at 1/300th the speed of lightabout 10 times as fast as electrons in silicon CMOS devices. Logic devices built from graphene will consume less power

Reconfigurable logic
Unlike any other technology being considered, graphene devices have the potential to simplify and speed up chips by creating truly reconfigurable logic. Such logic would be able to change its type on the fly: In response to electronic signals, an AND gate, for example, could be transformed into an OR gate and then back again.

 As you might imagine, no ordinary semiconductor can be used to shuttle electrons around like beams of light. In the silicon CMOS transistors that make up today's chips, electrons can barely move a few nanometers before they bounce off an impurity. Other semiconductor materials aren't much better.

But graphene is different. First isolated in 2004, the material consists of a single sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb-like lattice of hexagons. Roll it up and you've got a carbon nanotube. Stack it and you can make graphite. Graphene's symmetrical, twodimensional crystalline structure is responsible for most of its unique qualities.

Honey comb like lattice of hexagons

 electrons in graphene always move at the maximum velocity possible, regardless of how energetic they are. As a result, once they've been set in motion, electrons in graphene require no energy to keep going.

Creating artificial bandgap.

Graphene isn't really a semiconductor. Because graphene in its natural state has no bandgap, a vanishingly small amount of energy is needed to knock an electron free of its valence band. Engineers have some tricks that can be used to create an artificial bandgap. They can, for example, pattern graphene into very thin ribbons or apply an electric field across two layers of graphene stacked one on top of the other. But while these sorts of approaches do create a bandgap, they have the side effect of reducing electron speed.

Ref [4]

 By using graphene technology we can end up with a new technology than can keep the world on Moores law like- like progression toward cheaper, lower power and better performing processors

Two triangles of a graphene

 One of the first designs explored was the simple binary switch. we can build such a switch with just a square of graphene. If you draw an imaginary diagonal across the square, you create two triangles of graphene. Under each of these triangles you place a triangular wedge of conducting materialsuch as copper or heavily doped siliconthat can be either positively or negatively charged. These buried wedges act as gates, altering the electronic properties of the graphene above them.

 If both wedges have the same charge, the switch is on, and an electron coming from one side of the graphene square can move in a straight line from one side of the square to the other. But if opposite biases are applied, the two graphene regions will become oppositely doped, and nearly all the electrons will be reflected at the interface. Now the switch is off.

Gate test

Laboratory experiments have shown that graphene's resistance to the flow of current varies, depending on how it is angled when placed atop a pair of gates. The results suggest that the fraction of electrons that pass through the gate interface changes with the angle, just like light.

Conclusion
We might see graphen based reconfigurable logic prototypes with in the next five years that can replace CMOS circuits.

References:1) IEEE journal magazine february 2012 2) IEEE spectrum( http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/mate rials/graphene-the-ultimate-switch/0) 3) Wikipedia(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphen e) 4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law 5)ftp://download.intel.com/museum/Moores_Law/ Printed_Materials/Moores_Law_2pg.pdf

Thank you for listening