Stanford - Page 1

As electronics keep shrinking in size, several problems arise. One of these is that the copper wires that connect transistors to form complex circuits need to be very thin, but carry so much current that can cause them to break apart due to atoms being knocked out of place. One way of solving this, studied by a group led by Stanford University, is to wrap copper with graphene. The group found that this can alleviate this major problem called electromigration.

This was presented at a recent IEEE meeting that addressed the coming problems for copper interconnects and debated ways of getting around them. Growing graphene around copper wires can help prevent electromigration, and also seems to bring down the resistance of the copper wires. Generally speaking, the narrower the wire, the higher its resistance. “Interconnects have had to shrink while increasing the current densities by 20 times,” said Intel Fellow Ruth Brain at the meeting.

Researchers at the Berkeley Lab and Stanford University have used graphene as the film of an ultra-sensitive camera system designed for visually mapping tiny electric fields in a liquid. The new platform should permit single-cell measurements of electrical impulses traveling across networks containing 100 or more living cells. The researchers hope it will allow more extensive and precise imaging of the electrical signaling networks in our hearts and brains. Additional potential applications include the development of lab-on-a-chip devices, sensing devices and more.

The team explains that the basic concept was examining how graphene could be used as a general and scalable method for resolving very small changes in the magnitude, position, and timing pattern of a local electric field, such as the electrical impulses produced by a single nerve cell. Other techniques have been developed to measure electrical signals from small arrays of cells, but these can be difficult to scale up to larger arrays and in some cases cannot trace individual electrical impulses to a specific cell. In addition, this new method does not perturb cells in any way, which is fundamentally different from existing methods that use either genetic or chemical modifications of the cell membrane.