Graphene to Replace Silicon?

Moore’s law of exponential growth in computation power has so far held true. However, this might not hold for long as projections into the future predict that silicon based computation will hit a limit in terms of how much performance can be packed into the size. Graphene, however, is seen as the technology that will make silicon obsolete.

Graphene is basically a lattice of carbon molecules, with properties that are particularly beneficial to computing. A thin layer of carbon atoms is used to make the small, flexible display shown above. Memory can be stored within the carbon molecules itself, in the “state” of the atoms, which allows for a single unit to have multiple states (instead of the current binary system of the state being either on or off). This means that processing power can be amped up by several magnitudes. Think terahertz of processing power. The technology is some time away though.