Immigrants from Russia working in Britain, Konstantin Novoselov and Andrey Geim have created a graphene – translucent layer of carbon one atom thick in 2004. From this point almost immediately and everywhere we began to hear laudatory odes about various miraculous properties of a material with the potential to change our world and find its application in various fields, from the production of quantum computers to manufacturing filters for pure drinking water. It took 15 years, but the world is under the influence of graphene and has not changed. Why?
The problem is not only that graphene to make a very expensive and difficult, (so today it is created only in small quantities), but also in the fact that almost all the graphene, which is available today on the commercial market, is a forgery. But soon this may change if the rhetoric of the press release of the University of Cambridge, which says that created by former employees of one of the most prestigious universities of the world the new company Paragraf found a way to mass commercial production of this wonder material.
The company was founded in 2018 by three researchers: Professor Colin Humphries from the Department of materials science at Cambridge University, and scientists from Simon Thomas and Ivor, the Gini.
This week on the website of Cambridge University there is information about the company Paragraf began to manufacture graphene on a commercial scale in the form of an 8-inch (20 cm) graphene plates using a production technique which was developed by the three scientists in 2015. Here, it is clarified that the company was able to establish the production of high quality graphene wafers, beating not only other research groups from around the world, but also such giants in the field of production of semiconductor products, as IBM, Intel and Samsung, which, of course, also work in this direction.
In addition, the press release stated that the first electronic device based on a graphene company Paragraf going to introduce in the “next two months”.
Despite the fact that the source is not specified what it will be for the device, the potential scope of application of graphene, at least in theory, is virtually limitless, because it has very many useful properties. For example, this material is 200 times stronger than steel and has 10 times greater conductivity as compared with copper – conductor, which is widely used in the production different electronics.
In addition, compared with the same silicon (the main material for the production of various microarrays) graphene has 250 times greater electrical conductivity. In the press release of the University of Cambridge also States that if you replace the currently used microchips based on silicon microchips, built on the basis of graphene, we can increase the performance and speed of electronics based on them dozens of times; and built on the basis of graphene with various chemical and electrical sensors are 30 times more accurate than those that are based on more traditional materials.
“The company Paragraf has the potential to convert a wide range of industries, including electronics manufacturing, energy and medicine”, — quotes words of the head of the company Colin Humphreys University of Cambridge.
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