Graphene comes back: Researchers make a first functional semiconductor chip

Silicon is such a wonder material, it has pushed back all the other semiconductor materials due to the extraordinary economic, environmental, manufacturable, and various other values it offers over other semiconductor materials. Silicon is simply ruling the world now in terms of the proliferation of semiconductor devices all around. Still, silicon has its own weaknesses, such as, expensive processing of producing pure silicon, weak performance at extreme high frequencies, high-power switching, scaling further down to angstrom nodes, and its limitations in photonics. On one side, scientists are trying to improve silicon performance in semiconductor-optics, where they could make silicon optical waveguides replace copper interconnects on complex AI chips. On the other side researchers are also continuously searching for alternatives to silicon, which is abundant, economical, and easily processable and also performs well in microwave and beyond microwave frequencies such as terahertz and optical bandwidth.
Graphene looks to be excellent option since it is basically a pure carbon material and is abundantly available in environment. However graphene doesn't behave that well a semiconductor compared to silicon. It is more of a conductor than a semiconductor, posing a challenge to design a re...