Precision Graphene Nanoribbon Wires for Molecular Electronics Sensing and Switch

Patent Status

Additional Patent Pending

Brief Description

Bottom-up synthesized graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) have emerged as one of the most promising materials for post-silicon integrated circuit architectures and have already demonstrated the ability to overcome many of the challenges encountered by devices based on carbon nanotubes or photolithographically patterned graphene. The new field of synthetic electronics borne out of GNRs electronic devices could enable the next generation of electronic circuits and sensors. 

Suggested uses

The immediate application of this technology will be integration of GNR as highly sensitive parallelized sensors for biologically relevant systems including but not restricted to DNA sequencing, or high sensitivity detection of analyses (e.g. virus RNA).

Future applications include:

1. in the medium term, the integration of GNRs with CMOS architectures as electrical or magnetic switches that promise to increase the switching speed of integrated circuits from gigahertz to petaherz (5 orders of magnitude) while simultaneously lowering the power consumption by three orders of magnitude.
2. in the long term, the implementation of GNR-based qubits for quantum computing.

Advantages

This invention overcomes one of the grand, formidable engineering challenges in graphene nanoelectronics technology: the controlled assembly of highly parallelized GNR electronic device architectures. The technological advancement makes it possible to access GNR-based functional materials and electronic devices for seamless integration with, as well as augmentation and outperformance of, current semiconductor nanotechnology.

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