“In the technology industry, every new product or service seems to come with the promise that it is an innovation with the potential to change the world. Graphene, a form of carbon, might actually do just that,” Katherine Noyes reports for Fortune. “‘Graphene is a wonderful material,’ Jeanie Lau, a professor of physics at the University of California at Riverside, told Fortune. ‘It conducts heat 10 times better than copper and electricity 100 times better than silicon, is transparent like plastic, extremely lightweight, extremely strong, yet flexible and elastic. In the past decade, it has taken the scientific and technology communities by storm, and has become the most promising electronic material to supplement or replace silicon.'”
“Graphene has already found its way into a number of compelling applications, Lau said. For instance, ‘since it is both transparent and electrically conductive — two attributes rarely found in the same material in nature — it has tremendous potential as the transparent electrode in monitors, displays, solar cells, and touch screens,’ she explained. ‘Companies such as Samsung that invest heavily in this area have already secured patents, produced prototypes, and are expected to bring products to market in a few years,'” Noyes reports. “First produced in a lab back in 2004, graphene is essentially a single layer of pure carbon atoms bonded together in a honeycomb lattice so thin it’s actually considered two-dimensional. ‘We generally regard anything less than 10 layers of graphene as graphene; otherwise, it’s graphite,’ said Aravind Vijayaraghavan, a lecturer in nanomaterials at the University of Manchester.”
“Use of graphene in semiconductors — the technology’s Holy Grail — is likely a decade away,” Noyes reports. “Still, the possibilities that graphene holds for the nearly $2 trillion global electronics industry are difficult to ignore. ‘Imagine a tiny chip, one-tenth the size of a postage stamp, that your doctor could use to test for all kinds of things,’ Michael Patterson, CEO of Graphene Frontiers, said. ‘You’d walk in, and instead of having to give three vials of blood to test for two things and then get the results the next day, your doctor could use one drop of blood to test for hundreds of things and you’d get the results right away. Graphene makes it possible.'”
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