A team of researchers at the University of California has come up with a way to use graphene in a transistor without sacrificing speed. In a paper they’ve uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, the team describes how they took advantage of a property of graphene known as negative differential resistance to coax transistor-like properties out of graphene without causing it to behave as a semiconductor. As most everyone knows, using silicon as the basis for building transistors is reaching its logical conclusion—basic physics dictates that transistors based on it can only be made so small. Thus, efforts have been underway for several years to find a replacement material. One of the leading candidates, of course, is graphene—it has a variety of properties that would make it ideal, the best of which is the incredible speed in which electrons can move through it. Unfortunately, graphene is not a semiconducting material—it has no bad gap. That makes it useless as material for use in a transistor, which by its very nature must have a component that turns on and off. Graphene stays on all the time. Researchers have spent a lot of time, money and effort trying to force graphene to behave like

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