Graphene manufacturing was not needed as our best ~5nm chips could use copper wires to transfer electricity. I suppose the ones that are on R&D now (3, maybe 2 nm) also use copper (that's my guess only). But going smaller will require something better (meaning less resistant on such scale), so maybe Graphene will be back in the game.
At that scale, is it even useful to still call it “graphene”? 3nm is only 21 carbon atom diameters. How much of its desirable properties come from bulk effects? (Genuinely curious, I’m not qualified in chemistry).
Narrow and long strips of graphene are called nanoribbons in the literature. When they start to get really narrow their properties change significantly [1].
It’s probably workable in terms of material properties if you can manufacture it in the geometry needed, but I’m not an expert in 2d materials.
The edge of a graphene sheet is a defect that affects the electronic properties, with strong orientation dependence
However, in this article they intentionally introduce additional defects to tune the electronic properties, so there’s probably no fundamental issue. I agree with another poster here that manufacturing at scale in integrated devices is not obviously viable. Especially because it seems like a different method of introducing defects is needed if you want to grow the graphene by chemical vapor deposition.
> our best ~5nm chips could use copper wires to transfer electricity
I thought Aluminium and titanium were used in the lower interconnect layers, but according to [1] you are right.
The tech mentioned in the article is supposedly useful for transistors, not necessarily interconnect though. I guess that would be useful for going beyond planar processes. But at some point our current architectures are already severely limited regarding TDP anyway, so unless you can afford using only 10% of your chips, an architecture revolution is overdue IMO.
