Scientists pave way for carbon-based computers
Sept. 25 (UPI) -- Today's transistors, the building blocks of modern electronics, are mostly composed of silicon, but scientists theorize carbon-based transistors eventually could power faster, more efficient computers. Testing that theory has proven difficult, but thanks to a recent breakthrough, detailed Friday in the journal Science, researchers now are closer to finally building a transistor entirely from carbon. Advertisement A team of chemists and physicists at the University of California-Berkeley succeeded in building a metallic wire out of carbon. "Our breakthrough was to make metallic nanoribbons," study co-author Michael Crommie, professor of physics at Berkeley, told UPI in an email. Previously, scientists theorized that graphene nanoribbons could only form insulators or semi...
