How to grow electronics that are one atom thick

Once a channel is cut into the graphene, a molybdenum disulfide crystal can grow within it. (credit: Berkeley Lab)

The features we're making in current semiconductor materials are shrinking to the point where soon, they will be just a handful of atoms thin. Unfortunately, the behavior you get from bulk materials is often different from what you see when there are just a few atoms present, and quantum effects begin to dominate. There is an alternative, however: start with a material that is already incredibly small and has well-defined properties. Graphene, for example, is a sheet of carbon just one atom thick, and it's an excellent conductor; a variety of similar materials have been also developed.

It's a big challenge to manipulate these things that are just one atom thick, so it's really hard to put together any sort of circuitry based on these materials. Now, however, researchers have figured out how create a template where single-atom-thick materials will grow to create functional circuitry.

As we noted above, graphene is an excellent conductor of electrons, so the authors of the new paper decided to use it to create wiring. But getting sheets of graphene lined up to consistently create the wiring of even simple circuitry has been nearly impossible. The authors didn't even try. Instead, they took a larger sheet of graphene, dropped it onto silicon dioxide, and then etched away any material they didn't want. The etching involved a plasma of oxygen ions, which burned channels in the graphene that were about 15µm wide.

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