Researchers from UC Santa Barbara are introducing a new all-graphene integrated circuit design schema. The researchers suggest a fabrication process that starts with a single-layer graphene sheet, then etches it into ribbons (which turn to semiconductors or metals, depends on the width of the ribbons) and finally metal and gate dielectric are deposited and patterned. They say this design may allow much smaller transistors and interconnects than what's possible with silicon transistors and metal interconnects. They hope this design can be realized in the "near future".

One of the big advantages of this process is that it uses just graphene to create both the semiconducting transistors and the metal interfaces. This will result in lower interface/contact resistances. The researchers presented a study with performance evaluation - those circuits achieved a 1.7 times higher signal-to-noise margin and 1-2 decades lower static power consumption over current CMOS technology.

Yesterday we posted that Cientifica aims to become a public company in the UK, and today the AIM stock exchange announced that Cientifica indeed starts trading. The new company aims to acquire and build businesses that make use of graphene materials. The company will invest in by buying shares or by buying IP, assets or entering into partnerships of joint-venture arrangements.

Cientifica took over Avia Health Information stock. They disposed of the old business (for £1) and sold 16,300,000 shares at £0.02. So they raised £326,000, but the net proceedings will be £241,000 ($389,000). I'm not sure how many investments they will be able to make with such a low sum, it's likely they will need to raise more cash very soon. The company has 23,449,023 shares outstanding and the current share price is £0.025 (so the market value today is £586,225).

Researchers at Purdue University are developing a new graphene "nanopetals" mass production process. Those nanopetals are graphene-based vertical nanostructures that look like tiny rose petals, and they have applications in sensors, heat-management, supercapacitors and batteries. This research is funded with a $1.5 million grant from the NSF.

The researchers hope to increase the production speed of nanopetal-coated surfaces to 10 square meters per hour, using a roll-to-roll process. This is a dramatic increase to current "laboratory-scale" production rate. The new process will use a vacuum-based plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD).

Cientifica is a UK based company that provides strategic advice services for companies - helping them take advantage of emerging technologies. The company released a graphene investment guide, and now there are reports that the company is aiming to raise £500,000 (about $800,000), focus on graphene applications and go public in the UK's AIM stock exchange.

Cientifica will not make graphene, but try to find applications for the material. Actually, they plan to buy and develop companies that have proved technologies, and they will focus on using graphene in areas like industrial bio-technology (they also mention motor sports and aerospace). The company says they already found several cash-generation acquisitions that are under consideration.

The National University of Singapore and Fuji Electric (Malaysia) launched a new research project to develop graphene-based magnetic hard disk media. This project will explore how graphene may be used to provide a protective layer to HDD media. This will enable the magnetic heads to approach closer to the hard disks which will in turn enable higher densities.

The Graphene Research Center at NUS will integrate the graphene unto conventional magnetic media, and then Fuji Electric will conduct necessary assessments to ensure the new product is suitable for commercialization, including corrosion, durability and capacity tests. NUS is the sole proprietor of this new technology.

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Researchers from Korea's KAIST institute developed a lithium-air rechargeable battery using a nano fiber graphene composite catalyst. This battery has five times greater storage compared to current lithium-ion batteries, and is the highest performing lithium-air battery ever developed. Such batteries may enable electric vehicle to travel almost a 1,000 kilometers on a single charge.

Lithium-Air battery uses lithium on the cathode and oxygen on the anode. Such batteries has been researched for a long time as they are cheap to make and are lighter than lithium-ion batteries. But they are difficult to commercialize because they suffer from short lifespan (because of high resistance during the charge-discharge process). This new battery has a new catalyst made by mixing cobalt oxide nano fiber and graphene. This not just increased the storage, but also resulted in good lifespan - over 80 recharge cycles with capacity greater than 100mAh/g.

Researchers from the US, Germany, Singapore and Spain developed a new way to image and study grain boundary defects in graphene using surface plasmons. The idea is that by analyzing how the surface plasmons are reflected and scattered you can understand more about those defects. The researchers discovered that grain boundaries act as electronic barriers around 1020 nm in size and they are responsible for the CVD-grown graphene's low electron mobility.

In addition, the researchers say that the grain boundaries may actually be useful in the future - perhaps used as tuneable plasmons reflectors and phase retarders in "plasmonic circuits".

UK's Durham Graphene Science announced plans to go public, and raise up to £10 million (about $16 million) on the UK's AIM stock exchange. The company is also changing its name to Applied Graphene Materials (AGM). They will use the funds to increase production capacity and accelerate commercial opportunities with partners. If successful, AGM will be the world's first pure-graphene company to go public. This will be one interesting IPO to watch!

AGM says that trading is expected to begin next month. The company hopes to achieve a market value of £25 million ($40 million). The company, a spin-off from Durham University, developed a unique and scalable bottom-up CVD approach to synthesize graphene. Their current annual production capacity is one tonne of graphene (I'm assuming these are graphene flakes). The company will upgrade its plant to eight ton capacity (this will take about 18 months).

In January 2013 Europe selected the Graphene Flagship as its first $1 billion 10-year research program. Now, almost a year later, the project was officially launched in a ceremony led by Wolfgang Bosch of the European Commission, Karin Markides, President of Chalmers University of Technology, and Nokia's representative Tapani Ryhänen.

The graphene flagship project is led by theoretical physicist Jari Kinaret at Chalmers University. The consortium includes 75 academic and industrial partners from 17 European countries. The project will focus on developing graphene applications in the computing, batteries and sensor markets.