A research team from Georgia Institute of Technology and Tianjin University in the United States has created the world's first functional semiconductor made from graphene. The epitaxial graphene is chemically bonded with silicon carbide to show semiconductor properties. Measurements show that the mobility of graphene semiconductors is 10 times that of silicon, and its birth opens new doors to breaking the performance limits of traditional silicon-based semiconductors.

Physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester have won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for their efforts to isolate graphene from graphite. Graphene has since entered the public eye and become a shining "new star" in the material family.

In the big family of materials, graphene is only a "junior", but graphene has special significance for basic research in physics, which makes some quantum effects that can only be demonstrated in theory can be verified by experiment. In two-dimensional graphene, the mass of electrons seems to be absent, a property that makes graphene a rare condensed matter that can be used to study relativistic quantum mechanics - because massless particles must travel at the speed of light and therefore must be described by relativistic quantum mechanics.

In recent years, the research and application development of graphene has continued to heat up, and researchers are committed to trying different methods in different fields to prepare high-quality, large-area graphene materials. Through the continuous optimization and improvement of the graphene preparation process, the cost of graphene preparation is reduced, so that its excellent material properties are more widely used, and gradually move toward industrialization.

Only today has the problem been broken through. When the research team used a special furnace to grow graphene on a silicon carbide wafer, they produced epitaxial graphene, which is a single layer grown on a silicon carbide crystal face. When made properly, epitaxial graphene chemically bonds with the silicon carbide and begins to exhibit semiconducting properties.

But to make a functional transistor, a lot of manipulation must be done with the semiconductor material, which can compromise its performance, and to prove that their platform can function as a viable semiconductor, the team needed to measure its electronic properties without damaging it.

The team placed atoms on graphene and used doping techniques to "donate" electrons to the system, which they used to see if the material was a good conductor. Measurements show that their graphene semiconductor has a mobility 10 times that of silicon, in which electrons move with very low resistance, which in electronics means faster calculations.