Well folks, the all
grapheme chip set is obviously theoretically feasible and well on the way. It will be a decade but then the true holodec
will be about a decade after that. There
is really no technical hold back anymore that look to be anything more than
speed bumps.
I suspect that no other
material revolution has ever been adopted quite so quickly. What is amazing is that the general public is
barely aware but then that is not true.
They simply know that we will keep delivering miracles and we will. We have decades of proof behind us and we are
all now in the difficult to acquire habit of tossing completely usable obsolete
hardware as a matter of course.
I grew up using
hardware out of the nineteenth century and really appreciate what a culture
change this represents. Today every
person of Earth has access with only a few exceptions and even they are
crumbling.
We will soon be
directly connected through a simple convenient skull patch and a holographic on
demand screen that reads our words and lays them out. We may even wear eye covers that opens up the
available spectrum to us.
All-graphene computer
chip could steer us past the 22nm copper and silicon bottleneck
In
2015 — now just over a year away — the International Technology Roadmap
for Semiconductors (ITRS), which is set out by the industry’s top experts,
predicts that the copper wiring that connects together the billions of
transistors in a modern CPU or GPU just can’t be miniaturized any further. The
copper wires can only get so thin before the increased resistance and other
manufacturing issues make them unworkable. Graphene, however, by virtue of
its status as a wonder material, isn’t hindered by the same puny restrictions
as copper and could theoretically scale down to just a handful of nanometers or
less, allowing for the creation of computer chips that are orders of magnitude
more dense and powerful, while consuming less energy.
Way
back in 2011, IBM built what it called the first graphene integrated
circuit,
but in actuality it was more like a graphene field effect transistor (FET) and
inductor connected together with other standard, CMOS components, such as plain
ol’ copper wires. Now a team at the University of California, Santa Barbara
(UCSB) have proposed the first all-graphene chip, where the transistors and
interconnects are monolithically patterned on a single sheet of graphene.
In
a research paper, titled “Proposal for all-graphene monolithic logic circuits,”
the UCSB researchers say that “devices and interconnects can be built using the
‘same starting material’ — graphene,” and, perhaps more
excitingly, “all-graphene circuits can surpass the static performances of the 22nm complementary
metal-oxide-semiconductor devices.” To build an all-graphene IC (pictured
above), the researchers propose using one of graphene’s interesting qualities,
that depending on its thickness it behaves in different ways. Narrow ribbons of graphene are
semiconducting, ideal for making transistors — while wider ribbons are metallic,
ideal for gates and interconnects. [ could it be any
sweeter – arclein ]
For
now, UCSB’s design is just that — a computer model that should technically
work, but which hasn’t been built yet. In theory, though, with the worldwide
efforts to improve high-quality graphene production and patterning, we
should be able to build an all-graphene IC in the next few years. Even
then, though, it will still take a long time to go from laboratory prototype to
full-scale commercial production — perhaps a decade or more. For the time
being, the higher electron mobility of
III-V semiconductors compared
to silicon should provide a stopgap solution for the continuing miniaturization
and ultra-low-power requirements of modern computing. When graphene ICs do finally take off, though, we have terahertz
switching speeds and transistor densities in
the tens-of-billions to look forward to. [ holodec here
we come!!! – arclein ]
Research
paper: dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4818462 – “Proposal for all-graphene
monolithic logic circuits”
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