Speed current carrier - graphene Nanocarbon
Aug, 3, Portland, We were being using conventional Copper carriers to carry current. But, a new current carrier called "Graphene Nanoribbon" (also called as
The integration technique
When the Graphene nanoribbons are integrated with the carbon, which do have a higher current carrying capacity, the Graphene nanoribbons delivers very less during the current carrying process. The great advantage is, the carbon's thermal conductivity is much higher than copper and, Nanoribbons have a thermal conductivity of 1,000-5,000 watts per meter Kelvin, which is ten times greater than copper. So, on integration of both these elements leads to a very high thermal conductivity when compared to copper. The Georgia Tech researchers also claimed that graphene nanoribbons will mitigate electromigration, a growing problem for copper as line widths descend to the nanoscale.
A senior research engineer in Georgia Tech's Nanotechnology Research Center, Raghunath Murali said that, "No one had measured graphene's current carrying capacity before this,". "One possible reason that this property of graphene was not touted before is that there were no experimental results until our work " he continued.
Further he said, "If the current carried through a wire is close to the current-carrying capacity of the wire, then the chances of electromigration are greater than if the current in the wire is much smaller than the current-carrying capacity," and, "Graphene has over two orders of magnitude greater capacity than copper, thus, if a graphene wire is compared to a copper wire carrying the same current, then the graphene wire will better resist electromigration."
Three hurdles remain to commercialization of carbon interrconnects, according to the researchers: perfecting methods of growing monolayers of graphene over entire wafers (since only centimeter-sized areas can be easiliy grown in monolayers); fabricating vias to interrconnect graphene nanowires; and integration of carbon into the back-end of the CMOS manufacturing process.
This might reduce the growing problem of copper wires, says an engineer. It might be a great achievement if the technology gets its value, he continues.
Let us wait for the growing technology...
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