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This is but one of many game changers on the horizon. It may be a step in ushering in an age of 2D optical and electrical ultra high speed switching. A replacement for the standard transistor? This is one of many 2D materials that show a whole different path is possible for the semi industry.
Comments and additions welcome
This is but one of many game changers on the horizon. It may be a step in ushering in an age of 2D optical and electrical ultra high speed switching. A replacement for the standard transistor? This is one of many 2D materials that show a whole different path is possible for the semi industry.
Comments and additions welcome
Although fairly high fmax and ft have been demonstrated with graphene devices (see recent Nature Nano or IEDM papers), the lack of a sizeable bandgap limits their application space to high-frequency analog circuits - a space that's already pretty well covered on the low end by CMOS, and on the higher frequency end, by devices like HBTs. The high mobility is graphene is also extremely sensitive to dielectric interfaces, and requires special materials such as hexagonal Boron Nitride (h-BN) to surround the graphene in order for all of it's interesting properties to be preserved. No research group has successfully grown high-quality boron nitride in situ with graphene in the last 8 or so years that people have been working on this problem. Even if they could grow good material, it's not clear that a graphene/h-BN heterostructure would perform much better or be less expensive than competing III-V technologies.
I've worked on graphene for about 5 years and I can't say I'm very optimistic about its prospects.
ml3077, thank you for the information. Since you have been working with 2D materials, what do you think their future is? What other 2D materials do you think have a future? I was told about a year ago we'll see 2D materials out there in 5 or 6 years by Dr. Nalamasu, CTO of AMAT. Anything you could add to the discussion would be appreciated. I also have been following this for about five years with one of the Valley's top scientists who is now retired.
Graphene is interesting from an electron transport standpoint due to the mobility > 10,000 cm^2/v*s. However, as I mentioned, it is extremely difficult to preserve this level of performance due to its sensitivity to the quality of the dielectric interfaces. Electron transport applications (e.g., high-speed FETs, photodetectors) will probably not be very competitive from a cost standpoint unless a reliable, inexpensive method for fabricating dielectric interfaces is developed. I doubt this will occur based on what I've seen so far.
Other 2D materials don't have mobilities anywhere near graphene. However, MoS2 has a direct bandgap, and mobilities of 10 - 100 (~ 0.25X what is seen in CMOS devices), even when being flexed/strained. MoS2 could be a candidate for flexible electronic or optoeletronic applications where the only real competition right now is organics, which have been around a lot longer and still have lower mobility. There are other 2D transition metal dichalcogenides like WS2 that are being explored for electronic applications, but I haven't spent much time looking at them.
Overall I feel like 2D materials will find a new applications that has nothing to do with conventional electronics- or not as we know them now. None of these materials are candidates to supplant CMOS because they don't solve any of the scaling problems that plague CMOS, and they are inferior in most other respects.
ml3077, I have no doubt over the next five years we will see dramatic advances in 2D materials and that they will be used in layers. It will be not only 2D material, but the fabrication, design and handling techniques we will see large advances in. Just look at how much everything is changing and advancing, it's just part of the Silicon Valley culture and ethos.
