The latest contender to replace silicon is carbon – not nanotubes but graphene this time. Nature has a lot more about it here, although The Inquirer takes a rather more sceptical view.
Before anyone gets too excited there is a long way to go from creating a single electron transitsor in a lab to disrupting or displacing a 250 billion dollar industry – although someone may have said the same thing about silicon fifty years ago. Perhaps more readily exploitable are the applications of graphene to sieve gases and “image individual molecules with unprecedented accuracy.”
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