Thursday, March 26, 2009

Graphene Processor Chips to Reach 1000Ghz



Graphene might be the next material of choice for making processor chips, according to an MIT report. So, what’s so exciting about this? Well, Graphene chips could make for processors that run between 500GHz and 1,000GHz. That’s quite a leap from the current 5GHz chips, wouldn’t you say? We should see a commercial version of this technology within two years, according to MIT.

Discovered only in 2004, graphene is a flat one-atom thick sheet of carbon. It's one of the most exciting materials in Science and Technology as it’s the strongest and most reliable material ever discovered, and it has a great advantage over others: mobility, an electrical property which allows electrons to stir in the material.

The current research shows that a frequency multiplier could be created, which works to double a signal and likewise doubles a processor’s clocking speed. This is better than current frequency multiplication which produces a noisey signal that requires filtering to clean it up. The graphene chip allows much high frequency multiplication with less noise.

Although the study is at early stages, it has already drawn the attention of many other offices in the federal government and major chip-making companies and according to MIT, “it may take a year of work, maximum two” before the graphene chip enters in mass production.

I'm not sure if overclockers would still want to mess up with this one.

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