Google Runs Super Bowl Ad

Although Google’s business is selling advertising, it has not done much of its own, at least in the traditional electronic media.  It did, this evening, have an ad on television during the Super Bowl (the American football championship), after a flurry of rumors the previous week.  It’s one of Google’s “Search Stories”, a story outlined via entries in the Google search box, and you can watch it on YouTube.

In general, I’m not all that interested in either advertising or football — I happened to be in the room when the commercial came on — but the ad struck me as a good one, kind of understated and cool, just the kind of image that Google likes to project.  And it is a mark of their great success that I’m sure there were very few people who didn’t “get it”.

Update Monday, February 8, 11:14

Wired now has a short article up about the Google ad, and some of the reactions to it.

Speedy Graphene Transistors

According to an article at the PhysOrg.com site, IBM scientists have just announced, in a paper [abstract] published in Science, that they have created a new type of high-speed transistor using graphene (a particular form of carbon) that has the potential to replace silicon devices in high-speed applications.  From the abstract:

The high carrier mobility of graphene has been exploited in field-effect transistors that operate at high frequencies. Transistors were fabricated on epitaxial graphene synthesized on the silicon face of a silicon carbide wafer, achieving a cutoff frequency of 100 gigahertz for a gate length of 240 nanometers.

Graphene is a form of solid carbon in which the carbon atoms are arranged in a “honeycomb” hexagonal lattice, spaced about 0.142 nanometers apart.  It has sometimes been described as looking like “atomic-scale chicken wire”, which is not entirely fanciful when one looks at the image below, from a transmission electron microscope.

Image from:Albert Dato, Zonghoon Lee, Ki-Joon Jeon, Rolf
Erni,Velimir Radmilovic,Thomas J. Richardson,and Michael
Frenklach,Chem. Commun., 2009, 6095 - 6097
(DOI: 10.1039/b911395a)

The structure of graphene (which is similar to the structure in a benzene ring) means that electrons can move through the material very rapidly.  The high frequency (100 GHz) achieved by the IBM researchers was using a device fabricated with techniques compatible with semiconductor manufacturing.

“A key advantage of graphene lies in the very high speeds in which electrons propagate, which is essential for achieving high-speed, high-performance next generation transistors,” said Dr. T.C. Chen, vice president, Science and Technology, IBM Research. “The breakthrough we are announcing demonstrates clearly that graphene can be utilized to produce high performance devices and integrated circuits.”

This is a noteworthy step, since state-of-the-art silicon devices of the same  modest gate size (240 nanometers) have a cutoff frequency of about 26 GHz. High-frequency capability is inversely related to gate size, so there is a good chance that graphene devices with smaller gates will produce even faster performance.

The high carrier mobility of graphene has been exploited in field-effect transistors that operate at high frequencies. Transistors were fabricated on epitaxial graphene synthesized on the silicon face of a silicon carbide wafer, achieving a cutoff frequency of 100 gigahertz for a gate length of 240 nanometers.