[82lsju]

not exactly graphene but "white graphene" may extend Moore's law

In the current state of the art, the smallest components (transistors and diodes) made on a silicon chip are about seven nanometres (billionths of a metre) across. That is a thousandth of the diameter of a red blood cell. But problems are mounting. As components shrink, electrons start to leak from the connections between them, causing interference and unreliability. The prophets of doom have therefore returned. Once again, however, they look like being wrong. The answer to the electron-leakage problem is better insulation between chip components. And a group of researchers in South Korea and Britain think they have the insulator required. It is called thin-film amorphous boron nitride (a-BN).
The wonder that waits

The backstory of this material is intriguing. Boron and nitrogen lie on either side of carbon in the periodic table, one consequence of which is that materials composed of equal numbers of boron and nitrogen atoms crystallise in the same ways that carbon does. There are, in other words, boron nitride equivalents of diamonds and graphite. There are also boron nitride versions of the tiny arrangements of carbon atoms known as fullerenes and nanotubes. So it was no surprise, after the creation in 2004 of yet another allotrope of carbon, graphene, which consists of single layers of atoms arranged in a hexagonal grid like a honeycomb, that it had a boron-nitride analogue. This has come to be known colloquially as white graphene.

https://www.economist.com/science-and-te...technology

[82lsju]

not exactly graphene but "white graphene" may extend Moore's law

In the current state of the art, the smallest components (transistors and diodes) made on a silicon chip are about seven nanometres (billionths of a metre) across. That is a thousandth of the diameter of a red blood cell. But problems are mounting. As components shrink, electrons start to leak from the connections between them, causing interference and unreliability. The prophets of doom have therefore returned. Once again, however, they look like being wrong. The answer to the electron-leakage problem is better insulation between chip components. And a group of researchers in South Korea and Britain think they have the insulator required. It is called thin-film amorphous boron nitride (a-BN).
The wonder that waits

The backstory of this material is intriguing. Boron and nitrogen lie on either side of carbon in the periodic table, one consequence of which is that materials composed of equal numbers of boron and nitrogen atoms crystallise in the same ways that carbon does. There are, in other words, boron nitride equivalents of diamonds and graphite. There are also boron nitride versions of the tiny arrangements of carbon atoms known as fullerenes and nanotubes. So it was no surprise, after the creation in 2004 of yet another allotrope of carbon, graphene, which consists of single layers of atoms arranged in a hexagonal grid like a honeycomb, that it had a boron-nitride analogue. This has come to be known colloquially as white graphene.

https://www.economist.com/science-and-te...technology