IBM Scientists Show Off World's Fastest Graphene Transistor

Moore's law says that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles about every two years. Scientists and researchers are finding today that in a few years Moore's law will be broken if we are still using conventional building materials for transistors for several reasons. One of the materials that are being eyed for building the transistors and microprocessors of the future is a substance called graphene.

We have talked about graphene before and its promise of 1,000 GHz chips and scientists around the world are working with the material. Scientists at IBM have published a paper that demonstrates a radio-frequency graphene transistor with the highest cut-off frequency achieved so far using graphene. The transistor was able to hit 100 billion cycles per second or 100GHz.

IBM calls the accomplishment a key milestone in the Carbon Electronics for RF Applications program that is funded by DARPA with the goal of developing next generation communication devices. The 100GHz frequency was achieved with wafer-scale, epitaxially grown graphene using process tech that is compatible with what is used today in advanced silicon device fabrication.