November 2009

Fujitsu Laboratories announced that they have developed new technology for forming Graphene transistors directly on the surface of large-scale insulating substrates at low temperatures while employing chemical-vapor deposition techniques which are in widespread use in semiconductor manufacturing.

Compared to the temperatures of 800-1000 degree C at which graphene is formed with conventional methods, Fujitsu has succeeded in significantly lowering the graphene fabrication-temperature to 650 degree C thus allowing for graphene transistors to be formed directly on a variety of insulator substrates, including substrates that are sensitive to the higher temperatures.

In a recent technology forum, Samsung highlighted several new technologies. One of them is Graphene. It's not clear what Samsung are doing exactly, but they are obviously interested in this new and exciting material...

If you take Graphene, and then insert holes in a specific size and distribution, then it should be possible to impart the material particular electronic characteristics. This is why there is an intensive research to synthesize and characterize graphene-like polymers.

Now scientists have successfully created a graphene-like polymer. To achieve this feat the researchers allowed chemical building blocks of functionalized phenyl rings to grow spontaneously into a two-dimensional structure on a silver substrate. This created a porous form of graphene with pore diameters of a single atom and pore-to-pore spacings of less than a nanometer.

Until now, porous graphene has been manufactured using lithographic processes during which the holes are subsequently etched into the layer of material. These holes are, however, much larger than just a few atoms in diameter. They are also not as near to each other and significantly less precisely shaped as with the "bottom-up" technique based on molecular self-assembly developed by the Empa and Max Planck group. In this process the molecular building blocks join together spontaneously at chemically defined linking points to form a regular, two-dimensional network. This allows graphene-like polymers to be synthesized with pores which are finer than is possible by any other technique.

Rice University and Houston-based M-I SWACO, the world's largest producer of drilling fluids for the petrochemical industry, have signed an agreement for research funds to develop a graphene additive that will improve the productivity of wells.

The company will spend $450,000 over two years for research by the lab of James Tour, Rice's Chao Professor of Chemistry and professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science.