Around the same time the UK government was announcing its latest  investment in graphene research (GBP 50 million) for a graphene hub at the University of Manchester (mentioned in my Feb. 2, 2012 posting), a research team at the University of Manchester was making its own graphene announcement. From the Feb. 2, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

In a paper published this week in Science (“Field-Effect Tunneling Transistor Based on Vertical Graphene Heterostructures”), a Manchester team lead by Nobel laureates Professor Andre Geim and Professor Konstantin Novoselov has literally opened a third dimension in graphene research. Their research shows a transistor that may prove the missing link for graphene to become the next silicon.

Here’s why it’s exciting,

One of many potential applications of graphene is its use as the basic material for computer chips instead of silicon. This potential has alerted the attention of major chip manufactures, including IBM, Samsung, Texas Instruments and Intel. Individual transistors with very high frequencies (up to 300 GHz) have already been demonstrated by several groups worldwide.

The problem up until now has been this,

Unfortunately, those transistors cannot be packed densely in a computer chip because they leak too much current, even in the most insulating state of graphene. This electric current would cause chips to melt within a fraction of a second.

This problem has been around since 2004 when the Manchester researchers reported their Nobel-winning graphene findings and, despite a huge worldwide effort to solve it since then, no real solution has so far been offered.

Now the researchers have more or less solved the problem in the laboratory,

The University of Manchester scientists now suggest using graphene not laterally (in plane) – as all the previous studies did – but in the vertical direction. They used graphene as an electrode from which electrons tunnelled through a dielectric into another metal. This is called a tunnelling diode.

Then they exploited a truly unique feature of graphene – that an external voltage can strongly change the energy of tunnelling electrons. As a result they got a new type of a device – vertical field-effect tunnelling transistor in which graphene is a critical ingredient.

Dr Leonid Ponomarenko, who spearheaded the experimental effort, said: “We have proved a conceptually new approach to graphene electronics. Our transistors already work pretty well. I believe they can be improved much further, scaled down to nanometre sizes and work at sub-THz frequencies.”

I find the timing for the announcements rather interesting. The researchers at the University of Manchester make this exciting breakthrough, which is being published in Science magazine and publicized at roughly the same time that the UK government makes an announcement about funding for a graphene research hub at the University of Manchester. All of this just months prior to a European Union decision about which two flagship research projects (the graphene flagship project is one of six in contention and the UK has three research institutions including the University of Manchester participating in that consortium) will be receiving a 1 billion Euro prize Coincidence or conspiracy? I’m inclined to believe that there’s a just bit of strategy involved as I noted in my Feb. 2, 2012 posting about the ‘hub announcement’, the graphene flagship/consortium, and the strategy.