Graphene transistors promise 100GHz speeds
 

. The leading candidate to replace silicon being pursued by, well, pretty much everyone, is graphene. Graphene, single sheets of graphitic carbon, is exciting because it is a single atom thick and has remarkably high electron mobilities (100 times greater than silicon), making it ideally suited to atomic-scale, high-speed operation. Also, graphene's electrical properties can be controlled, switching it among conducting, semiconducting and electrically insulating forms. That means graphene-only (or, more likely, graphene-mostly) devices are, in principle, possible.

The graphene FETs in this work were tested up to 30GHz and, extrapolating those results, the authors showed that the FETs would operate, albeit poorly, up to 100GHz. Similarly sized Si devices are limited to 30GHz operation. Assuming these devices can be scaled, they will undoubtedly present a dramatic speed increase over current generation Si.

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