Researchers at North Carolina State University have reportedly developed a new form of graphene technology that is claimed to be suitable for electronics cooling systems. The copper-graphene composite materials are said to bring a 25 percent improvement in thermal conductivity compared to pure copper.
Korean researchers have developed flexible transistors using graphene to accomplish the feat. The researchers had experimented with a range of conventional materials including molecules, polymers and metals but found them to be ineffective for this purpose. Graphene has an advantage in that it can be integrated using the traditional printing processes at room temperatures without vacuum or high-temperature steps.
British scientists have discovered a way to transmit light much more efficiently than current fiber optic technology. The technique uses increasingly popular graphene in conjunction with tiny metallic structures known as plasmonic nanostructures. The combination could transfer information at speeds tens or potentially hundreds of times faster than the fastest Internet cables available today.
Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have showed off graphene-based technology that could bring much faster digital communications speeds. An experimental optical device was created that uses graphene, a one-atom-thick layer of crystallized carbon, that switches light on and off much faster than current network modulator technologies. The team, lead by engineering professor Xiang Zhang, believes it can eventually scale its technology up to 500GHz, which is much faster than current 1GHz tech.
Researchers from the University of Illinois may have found a way of creating transistors from graphene that have a unique self-cooling property. Current limitations of computer chips made from silicon revolve around the way they generate heat which often require an external cooling source. This affects the size of the chips and how efficient they can be. The new technique using graphene could deliver smaller, more powerful chips that could require little or no cooling at all.
A recent report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is naming Graphene, a form of pure carbon founded in 2004 that could be applied to microchips to make for faster processing speeds than is possible with current silicon chips. Researchers outside of MIT have created prototype transistors and similar simple devices using one-atom thick Graphene, but the newer MIT findings could make for more advanced applications. The researchers built an experimental Graphene chip that acts as a frequency multiplier, capable of doubling the frequency of an electromagnetic signal, or effectively doubling a CPU's clock speed.
