Rice University research that capitalizes on the wide-ranging capabilities of graphene could lead to circuit applications that are far more compact and versatile than what is now feasible with silicon-based technologies.
Triple-mode, single-transistor amplifiers based on graphene -- the one-atom-thick form of carbon that recently won its discoverers a Nobel Prize -- could become key components in future electronic circuits. the discovery by Rice researchers was reported this week in the online journal ACS Nano.
Graphene is very strong, nearly transparent and conducts electricity very well. But another key property is ambipolarity, graphene's ability to switch between using positive and negative carriers on the fly depending on the input signal. Traditional silicon transistors usually use one or the other type of carrier, which is determined during fabrication.
A three-terminal single-transistor amplifier made of graphene can be changed during operation to any of three modes at any time using carriers that are positive, negative or both, providing opportunities that are not possible with traditional single-transistor architectures, said Kartik Mohanram, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice. He collaborated on the research with Alexander Balandin, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Riverside, and
their students Xuebei Yang (at Rice) and Guanxiong Liu (at Riverside).
Mohanram likened the new transistor's abilities to that of a water tap. "Turn it on and the water flows," he said. "Turn it off and the water stops. That's what a traditional transistor does. It's a unipolar device -- it only opens and closes in one direction."