UK-based Graphene Innovations Manchester (GIM) has entered into a deal for the commercial production of carbon fiber enriched with graphene in Saudi Arabia. Graphene Innovations Manchester has agreed to construct a factory in the Gulf state to manufacture the material for use in the kingdom's plans to build futurist eco-cities in the desert.

The factory will be built in Saudi Arabia with the backing of investors. Image from: BBC

Reports suggest that about £250 million could be invested in building a research and innovation hub in Greater Manchester as part of the deal and more than 1,000 jobs could be created.

 A semiconductor startup called Destination 2D has announced it has successfully achieved wafer-scale synthesis of high-quality graphene within CMOS-compatible process conditions. In doing so, the company is enabling the use of graphene as a 2D material in mainstream semiconductor products through its 300mm scale graphene synthesis equipment – the CoolC GT300™.

The issues facing the semiconductor industry as they relate to interconnects are profoundly impacted by the ever-shrinking dimensions of regular process technology. The standard interconnect material, copper, has been used for the past 30 years and is now reaching commercial end-of-life due to Moore’s Law and electron migration that renders copper extremely problematic in low geometry fabrication. At sub-15 nm interconnect dimensions, the resistivity of copper increases rapidly – causing significant degradation in both circuit and system-level performance, power, and dramatically impacting all reliability metrics required by modern semiconductor designs in products such as GPUs, CPUs and others.

HydroGraph Clean Power has announced an increase in its non-brokered private placement to CAD$3.5 million (around USD$2,475,000) from its previously announced offering on November 26, 2024, due to strong investor demand. 

The proceeds will fund application development at the Graphene Engineering Innovation Center (GEIC), production upscaling, business development, and working capital. 

Bio Graphene Solutions (BGS) has announced that it has completed a pilot commercial concrete pour with EllisDon Corporation, a global construction services and technology company, and Tomlinson Ready Mix, one of Ottawa’s largest concrete providers and part of the Tomlinson Group of Companies.  

The Company’s proprietary graphene-enhanced admixture was integrated into the operational flow of a Tomlinson Ready Mix 32MPa-C-2 sidewalk concrete pour at an active construction project managed by EllisDon’s Ottawa team. The biographene-enhanced concrete mix utilized 10% less cement than the control mix design without sacrificing the fresh properties of the concrete. This pilot testing is a critical milestone in demonstrating the in-situ performance of the biographene-enhanced mix, validating lab trials which have shown that the concrete achieves the 28-day targeted strength of 32MPa by 7 days. 

Researchers from the University of California, Harvard University, University of Manchester, UC Santa Cruz and the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan have conducted an experiment that confirms a 40 year old theory that electrons confined in quantum space would move along common paths rather than producing a chaotic array of trajectories.

Electrons exhibit both particle and wave-like properties and behave in ways that are often counterintuitive, and under certain conditions, their waves can interfere with each other in a way that concentrates their movement into certain patterns. Physicists call these common paths “unique closed orbits.”

Scientists from the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), University of Chicago, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Argonne National Laboratory are collaborating on new electron microscopy techniques to allow the imaging of chemical reactions at the atomic scale. The Center for Multimodal Observations for Single Atom Imaging of Chemistry, or MOSAIC, was funded this fall through a $1.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation. 

The collaboration, part of the NSF Centers for Chemical Innovation program, will create “liquid cells” that allow scientists to set up, control and measure chemical reactions under a microscope. The researchers will use powerful, state-of-the-art electron microscopes at UIC to capture these reactions in motion, providing fresh insight into atomic and molecular dynamics.

Researchers from North Carolina State University and Iowa State University have demonstrated a new technique for self-assembling electronic devices. The proof-of-concept work was used to create diodes and transistors, and could pave the way for self-assembling more complex electronic devices without relying on existing computer chip manufacturing techniques.

D-Met fabricated patterns produce components for potential use in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). Image credit: Julia Chang and NCSU.

“Existing chip manufacturing techniques involve many steps and rely on extremely complex technologies, making the process costly and time consuming,” says Martin Thuo, corresponding author of a paper on the work and a professor of materials science and engineering at North Carolina State University. “Our self-assembling approach is significantly faster and less expensive. We’ve also demonstrated that we can use the process to tune the bandgap for semiconductor materials and to make the materials responsive to light – meaning this technique can be used to create optoelectronic devices. What’s more, current manufacturing techniques have low yield, meaning they produce a relatively large number of faulty chips that can’t be used. Our approach is high yield – meaning you get more consistent production of arrays and less waste.”

Haydale has announced its financial results for Q3 2024, which is the end of its 2024 fiscal year. Haydale says that while it has developed an excellent pipeline of opportunities, the timeline of converting these into sales takes longer than anticipated.

Haydale's revenue in FY2024 was 4.82 million GBP (up 12% from 2023), and the company reported a slightly improved loss of 3.16 million GBP (down from 3.49 million in 2023).

Sparc Technologies has announced the results of initial test work in water-based acrylic epoxy coatings. The testing has reportedly demonstrated significant corrosion performance improvements through the incorporation of low dosages of carefully selected grades of graphene compared to an unmodified control. Testing has been performed using two industry-recognized electrochemical measurement techniques.

Water-based coatings are gaining prominence due to better environmental credentials compared to more widely used solvent-based coatings which contain fossil fuel derived organic solvents. These results are the first evidence that Sparc has seen whereby graphene significantly improves the corrosion performance of water-based coatings. This extends Sparc’s reach into a new and rapidly growing area of the coatings market where there are clear performance challenges to address. It also complements Sparc’s flagship ecosparc® product range.