Well over a year ago, on April 2, 5, and 15, 2008 to be exact, I posted few comments on graphene. I marveled about unique properties of this 2D carbon and, just like most everybody, considered it to be a very promising material for the future. Somehow, I felt good about grapahene’s prospects because I could see the path for its integration into the mainstream MOSFET technology.
During the recent IEDM, papers devoted to graphene convinced me that we are no longer talking about graphene just in terms of the “promise”. Based on the review papers presented it looks like reports on the fully functional FETs with graphene channels fabricated using various techniques, and on various substrates, abound. For instance, devices with reported cut-off frequency up to 50 GHz rather convincingly demonstrate the potential of graphene for RF applications.
Overall, I was surprised to see how advanced is the exploration of graphene in the real-life applications.