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Hi all, My name is Xander, I'm an Australian student in my senior year of high school. As part of the Australian Curriculum I need to take part in a Research Project; a compiled folio of information to answer an open ended question. I am looking into Silicon Processor Technology and what limits it has, how far it can be taken and what are future contenders for Processor materials. A segment of the folio is an interview with a professional, and I see the community here as a large enough pool to be considered professional. My main reason for the email is to ask if you'd like to answer 10 short questions as this would greatly aid my Research Project (attached as a Word Document) Look forward to hearing from you. Regards, Xander Interview Questions.docx

Hi all, Sorry to post this again but the survey here is absolutely vital to my senior year of schooling (so much so that I am required to pass this assignment to pass this year) You don't need to know a whole lot about processors at all, or anything even. As any response is useful to gain opinions and information from a wide range of audiences. Regards, Icarus

Source: Rice University via Ars Technica nn7b05874_si_001.pdf This could be the answer to crappy smartphone/laptop batteries. ? Wang, T., Salvatierra, R. V., Jalilov, A. S., Tian, J., & Tour, J. S. (2017, September 27). Ultrafast Charging High Capacity Asphalt–Lithium Metal Batteries. ACS Nano. doi:10.1021/acsnano.7b05874 The journal is unfortunately behind a paywall and I am not paying for that. But the feature article from Rice University and Ars will suffice. What the researchers did is use cheap asphalt to store the Lithium. It is the same asphalt used in the road to smooth it out and make tires last longer than driving on a rough concrete road. The asphalt is heated off to remove low molecular weight hydrocarbons and the remaining solids are treated with a strong base Potassium Hydroxide (KOH) which makes it porous. Each gram of the treated asphalt has a 30,000 square meters of surface area. The porous structure and some of the oxygen within the treated material helps the surface interact with the lithium metal. From Rice University: Another advantage as it turns out from this new kind of battery is that it can prevent another Samsung Galaxy Note 7 explosion by mitigating the formation of dendrites which can short circuit the battery. While this safety prevention mechanism isn't new as it is found on existing technologies like graphene, asphalt is cheaper to produce. Just imagine the possibilities of smartphones and laptops having 24 hour battery life and it can be kept slim with much lower risk of exploding unlike the Note 7. From Ars Technica: And it's not only smartphone OEMs should look out for this but car manufacturers especially electric cars. With more and more people are looking into completely getting rid of hydrocarbon-powered vehicles because of environmental concerns as well as the growing sales of electric cars, the likes of Tesla, Chevrolet, Toyota, Honda, etc should look into technologies like this which increases battery capacity while keeping the vehicle safe from explosions. Just imagine an electric car that can travel 500 miles/805 kilometers on a single charge and it is charging very fast. Well, just like anything else, the first opposition I can see are coming from oil companies but with the byproducts of oil refineries like asphalt are being used in the manufacturing of this new battery, there could be way less opposition from oil companies unlike people digging coal are protesting against renewable energy sources despite the fact that coal digging is already a dying industry.

From OverClock.Net forum in the Mayhems thread. Update: Mick from Mayhems posted this below, updating original post to reflect new information.

Nick named the 'Mechanical Pixels’ , unlike regular LED pixels which takes in electricity & it it self emit varying range of color , with the help of LED backlighting, this display surface does it without needing a electrical source to start working, it works under a whole new principle , principle of takes advantage of Graphene bubbles(doing the job of representing pixels)under certain conditions alter their balloon-like structures which acts like pixels to emit visible color range , it currently it works only on reflected light (light source isis indirectly ) Lemme list some cons i saw the color changes have only been observed under a microscope resulting pixels are too small (10nm), that hundreds of thousands would be needed to create even a tiny image expensive to manufacture graphene samples at a greater size you cannot get clean colors like pure red or pure blue yet Method to control pressure inorder to achieve the image is still under works Light source dependent , cannot be viewed on a dark environment Now the Pros New display technology pixel size is really small , meaning seriously fine details can be brought up with high clarity Power consumption reduction New ergonomic designs for adaptive display tech , maybe restrictive but consistent image display non reliable on electricity & artificial backlighting , far smoother image transmission as in real life like if used with temperature/pressure instead of electricity (possible death of refresh rates if properly implied??) Research was done in collaborative effort from researchers at TU Delft, Netherlands, and Graphenea, Spain, as part of the Graphene Flagship have found a new way to create mechanical pixels using tiny balloon-like structures which do not emit light themselves but are visible in sunlight, could lead to energy-efficient colour displays that can be used in devices such as e-books and smart watches hopefully in e-papers . Video (virtual demo) The production of color can be influenced by pressure , By applying a pressure difference across the graphene membranes, the perceived/produced color of the graphene can be shifted continuously manipulated. This effect can be exploited in order to create different colored pixels imagine picture frame not requiring any/very few power to be visible (cort: some HarryPotter gif i thought would be relative) How it works, The above shown image(to your left) are cavities that are of the size of 1/1000th diameter of a human hair(these are spread over a mirror like surface like a pixel arrangement parallel & organized), these are covered with 2 layers of graphene (suspended membrane) & due to pressure difference the top one is exhibiting visible color change just due to pressure difference alone, this can be amplified & changed & dampened according to your liking , mind you these color changed after a while under the same pressure, this was later identified caused due to pressure difference inside & outside those cavity being shifted due to regular conditions & Light interference assisted the color change constructively & destructively (resulting in varying range of color) Each of these pixels (mechanical pixels) could be moved (shifting image boundary) by using pressure or temperature , The researchers hope to have a screen prototype for the Mobile World Conference 2017 in Barcelona. This seems promising for me, if they actually make this thing work in a real world environment Sources: http://www.tudelft.nl/en/current/latest-news/article/detail/delftse-onderzoekers-creeren-bij-toeval-nieuwe-energie-efficiente-mechanische-pixels/ http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/24/13740946/dutch-scientists-use-color-changing-graphene-bubbles-to-create-mechanical-pixels

Article: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2017-01-31/scientists-cook-up-super-strong-graphene-out-of-soybean-oil/8223686 Experiment: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14217 Assuming the finished product looks the same, i would love to see what would happen if they applied the graphene film directly onto a delidded CPU and then allowed for the heat transfer to go directly onto the heatsink. Better yet, use that WC IHS they reviewed a little while back and see if they can get even lower temps at 5GHz on the same CPU they tested originally. Edit: They reviewed a product!

A Rice University grad student has discovered a new process for creating graphene. Flash Graphene uses almost any carbon based matter, placed between two electrodes, flashed to over 3000 degrees kelvin, to create graphene and bleed off most other elements as gasses in microseconds. The process promises to allow the production of graphene, that currently costs up to $200,000 per ton, to drop to a couple hundred per ton primarily in electricity costs. The raw materials can be primarily waste. Biological waste, plastics, papers, etc. Almost anything carbon based can be processed this way to produce graphene. The graphene produced using this method is also far purer than many other methods, requires no massive investments of energy or dangerous chemicals, and is far easier to utilise in practical applications On top of the advancements in high tech and new tech applications it can also help in some surprising low tech applications With affordable sourcing of graphene we could see a lot more research into practical applications and all those oft touted future energy sources and stores could actually be commercially feasible now that graphene can be produced for what amounts to pennies worth of electricity and garbage. EDIT: One proposed use for this process is to shunt coal production from being burned for electricty production to being flashed for graphene production. Re-sequestering the carbon in a form that can be used in a plethora of high tech, and low tech, applications. Like cement, batteries, advanced meta-materials, etc.

I’m sure by now, you’ve all heard of the magical material known as graphene. It’s become popular in recent years and has even found its way into popular culture most notiably in my mind on the show The Big Bang Theory where it’s mentioned often. But that’s always it, isn’t it? It’s often mentioned but nothing ever seems to come from it. This may soon be changing. This post is brought to you today by the awesome folks of the scientific journal Nature and the fine folks of phys.org (https://m.phys.org/news/2018-09-graphene-enables-clock-terahertz-range.html) So? What exactly is graphene? Well, the simplest definition of graphene is a single, ultra thin layer of interlinking graphite carbon atoms in a hexagonal pattern. But that doesn’t do justice to the potential benefits of what graphene really is: it nothing short of the future as it can be used to make stronger building materials, better speaker systems, extremely thin lighting and even stronger than diamond body armor. All of which, except, I guess, the last one could be used one day in a cellphone to make it incredibly durable. But now, graphene may conceivably make it into a future smart phone in your pocket in another way: it’s CPU. And it will be much faster than today. With the unsustainably of silicone to meet the ever growing demand of CPUs in today’s world, large tech giants are looking for its next replacement. This could come in the form of graphene. But they aren’t quite there, yet. Currently, they are simply working on the Meaning, in short, a possible replacement for silicon found in processors. Well. That theory may well have just been proven correct. In the article above, speaking of their breakthrough into this theory, Prof. Dmitry Turchinovich at the University of Duisburg-Essen, states That effect (are you ready for this): ONE TERAHERTZ of potential processing power! But like most potentials of this highly popular and fairly new super conductor, things are still a long way off from being a consumer product but, oh boy, if it doesn’t give us something to dream about. And the future looks fast!

https://www.androidcentral.com/samsungs-use-graphene-batteries-increases-charge-speed-five-times Considering that most electronics such as smartphones, tablets, laptops/notebooks, and even cars are powered by lithium ion batteries that have not seen much significant innovation in the past years, the fact that Samsung is introducing this graphene technology would probably take this slow moving industry to the next level. Just in the smartphone world, most flagship phones are becoming more and more similar to each other especially in the processor, display, build, software, and battery areas. As a consumer, the quality and size of the battery in a phone is an important factor on deciding whether or not I should buy it. Although I doubt that this technology will be implemented on the next Samsung Galaxy flagships especially after the credit it has to rebuild as a company after last year, we could finally have commonplace 4500mah+ batteries in our phones that could last us not only a few days (helpful for me since I often forget that unless I charge overnight, I'll end up with 25% power in the morning) compared to phones of today that can't last a day of heavy use without a charge, but also a few years thanks to the improved charge retention, a problem of li-ion batteries. Moving beyond the scope of phones, this tech could help create a world where electric cars can go significantly farther than their fuel based counter-parts with less charging time. The possibilities are endless. Hope Samsung doesn't mess this up. Additional Articles http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5121445/Samsungs-new-graphene-batteries-charge-5x-faster.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/great-balls-graphene-samsung-tech-111013765.html

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/208618-graphene-sheathed-copper-wires-could-dramatically-speed-future-processors-cut-power-consumption http://phys.org/news/2014-05-physicists-unlimited-graphene.html Stanford scientists have recently made note that in semiconductors, the copper wiring interconnects deep in the bowels of your chips are wrapped in a layer of Tantalum Nitride which serves 2 functions. 1) Ensure the copper does not flow where it is unwanted during the manufacturing process 2) Provide a support and cooling structure around the copper. To put it simply, heat generated in any resistive circuit (anything that isn't a superconductor) is directly proportional to the current^2 * resistance of the circuit. The resistance of a wire is inversely proportional to its diameter. As wires get thinner, resistance grows, heat generation increases, and heat dissipation abilities are lost, hence the Tantalum Nitride layer. All the major semiconductor companies are having issues reducing the size of their metal layers because of these effects which also effect clock rate ceilings. Stanford has found a way to use Graphene to replace this layer, and constructing the graphene sheaths is actually easy from a manufacturing standpoint compared to trying to produce uniform sheets of the stuff, and a perfect lattice isn't required. A single support layer of graphene would be 1/8 the thickness of Tantalum Nitride, but what wasn't covered in the ExtremeTech article is even more interesting. Graphene has a greater than ideal thermal dissipation property. Due to quantum mechanical effects beyond my education level in the field, graphene conducts heat better the longer the path between the source and drain becomes, a behavior contrary to every other material on earth (to my knowledge). In other words, the effort needed to keep a CPU or GPU cool may take a nose dive in the next five years. Furthermore, because of this heat dissipation ability, we should see semiconductor companies being better able to shrink their metal layers again, meaning ever more transistors for you and me. One last bit from the Extremetech article.

http://thenews.pl/1/12/Artykul/189573,Polish-scientists-develop-revolutionary-graphene-machine Long story short: the Polish scientists noted in the article have devised and produced a machine which can make 99.9% pure graphene sheets as large as 2500cm^2 in 4 hours each. This is just the prototype machine and will not be commercially available until mid-2015 at the earliest. Also, IBM and Samsung and their pending lawsuits can suck it. For those of you who don't know why this is amazing, graphene is one of if not the biggest contender to replace silicon after 3nm lithography. It's also 100% electrically efficient if correctly tainted by other elements. Furthermore, MIT and others have already produced basic single-core CPUs running at 400GHz and higher that barely give off heat. Once you have a pure graphene wafer base (much like a silicon wafer) it's only a matter of spraying chemicals on it and running electrical currents to line them up. With this crucial step done, the new CMOS processes are trivial to develop by comparison since the best elecrochemists in the world have been doing it for so long.

However, the graphene is too brittle to make into a solid material,but, "The cracks are one weakness of single-layer graphene, Lee says, but it nevertheless performs twice as well as Kevlar and withstands 10 times the kinetic energy that steel can." My thoughts: This is cool, but who couldn't see this coming? Well now it has been tested an proven that even with the cracking, graphene is still more effective. What can't you do with graphene? Article: http://www.engadget.com/2014/11/28/graphene-stronger-than-kevlar-when-blasted-with-mach-9-microbull/ Original Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26626-bulletproof-graphene-makes-ultrastrong-body-armour.html?cmpid=RSS|NSNS|2012-GLOBAL|online-news#.VHgTpzHF98F

You may have heard of Graphene before. Its two dimensional material with wonderful properties such as great thermal and electrical conductivity, strength and others. Robert Murray-Smith is independant researcher who is trying to exploit the wonderful properties of this amazing material. He makes graphene on his own, and his project is to make graphene ink available to everyone for much lower cost than it is right now. The founds collected will be used to buy equipment (three roll mill) that will enable him to make graphene ink more succesfully. For the perks, you can get the ink, a book of ideas what to use the ink for, or if you are even more generouns he give you his 10 grams of graphene oxide that currently sells for around 850 dollars on the market.

The researchers believe that having identified the subtle twisting in bilayer graphene, it will be possible to develop a better manufacturing process that prevents twisting. It won’t be easy, though. As few as ten offset atoms per square micrometer could cause enough of a twist to prevent bandgaps from functioning. Still, the mystery is solved, and we’re closer than ever to faster electronics with graphene. Source: http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmat3717.html

Thermene launched a new product based on graphene - the Thermene Graphene Thermal Paste is based on graphene-oxide flakes and is aimed towards CPU cooling. The company just started selling this new product a few days ago. The company says this about the TIM; "Thermene is a highly advanced thermal compound (paste) that is unlike any thermal paste ever before seen. Thermene blows every other consumer thermal compound out of the water. The secret to Thermene's amazing performance is the incredible substance called graphene." - No Aluminum - 3c to 17c difference in temperatures - Very easy to apply - 10 hour cure time Source: http://www.graphene-info.com/thermene-launches-graphene-oxide-based-thermal-paste-cpu-cooling Company Site & How to buy: http://thermene.com/products/thermene

It seems IBM really wants to stay at the top by investing heavily in the future generation of chip manufacturing which can only be good for us consumers as Moore's law is really struggling at the moment. The article is from ExtremeTech http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/186048-ibm-plows-3-billion-into-7nm-chip-research-and-post-silicon-technologies So what do you guys think, when will we see a 7nm consumer chips or even below that and what computational methods are you most interested in?

Graphene is one of those material science breakthroughs that’s so frequently described as a harbinger of technological revolution, it almost feels hackneyed. Almost, until an update like this rolls around: Scientists at Cambridge today demonstrated the first graphene-based flexible display. “This is a significant step forward to enable fully wearable and flexible devices,” said the Director of the Cambridge Graphene Centre, Professor Andrea Ferrari, in a statement made today. Ferrari was describing the impact of the prototype device, which is compared to a screen of your average e-reader — with the glass screen replaced with a plastic one. The biggest difference, of course, is what’s behind that plastic: Instead of the metal electrodes you’d find on an e-reader, there are graphene electrodes: According to the CGC, the graphene display clocks in at a perfectly respectable 150 pixels per inch, and the center says it’s working on full-colour versions. It’s the first flexible graphene display we’ve seen demonstrated, and in the demo video, we see the thin plane of plastic being bent and then cycling through the pages of a 1950s-style “recipe book” explaining how to make a graphene display. Though still very rough, it’s interesting to see how the much-hyped technology actually looks in practice. Maybe those folding phones aren’t quite as far away as we assumed. [Cambridge Graphene Centre] source http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2014/09/watch-the-first-graphene-based-flexible-display-get-bent-out-of-shape/

Have you ever heard about graphene? Maybe yes, but still do you know that if graphene is used for making computer chips, then our pc would perform 10x better and faster. Instead of getting 10fps in low settings in cyberpunk; you would get 100+fps on high settings even if you have a low spec pc. Graphene is really hard to make though. Companies did not official announce if they will use graphene for these chips but we may get news in future if they manufacture these :)