Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Two for the price of one.

I had noticed (and it was also pointed out by a colleague) the essentially simultaneous publication of this paper and this paper (which appear to have been submitted within a week of each other as well).  In both papers, the authors have created short-channel graphene-based transistors in a clever way. They take a conductive nanowire (doped GaN in the Nano Letters paper; CoSi in the Nature paper), coat it with thin aluminum oxide via atomic-layer deposition, and then lay it down on top of a piece of exfoliated graphene. Then they evaporate Pt on top of the device. On either side of the nanowire, the Pt lands on the graphene, making source and drain electrodes. The nanowire shadows part of the graphene (the channel), and then the nanowire itself acts as the gate. This is a nice, self-aligned process, and the resulting graphene devices appear to be very fast (the Nature paper has actual high frequency measurements). Looks like they managed to get two papers in good journals for the price of one technique advance.

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