Carbon based phones on the way

As you may know, mobile phones require a small amount of rare earth elements: gallium, indium, and arsenic, which are scarce and expensive at the same time. But what if it were possible to make phones of the most common elements, like carbon. After all, this chemical element never ceases to amaze us.

Researchers are slowly but surely making the inside of a mobile phone from carbon (carbon) nanotubes, whose structure resembles a microscopic sheet of wire mesh rolled into a cylinder. Such cylinders can be used as a conductor of electricity, and for energy storage.

Jacob Wagner and his colleagues from the Technical University of Denmark found the best way to create carbon nanotubes that can be used as semiconductors, key components of all electronic circuits that underlie mobile phones and laptops. Carbon nanotubes have the properties of both metal and semiconductor, depending on how they are rolled.

“The breakthrough is that we are able to control the production of nanotubes and choose whether they are metal or semiconductor,” said Wagner. “This is important, because if you want to use them in mobile phones, you need to be sure of the type of nanotubes. In the future, such semiconductor carbon nanotubes could be a replacement for gallium. "

The next step will be the possibility of producing a large number of semiconductor carbon nanotubes that can be inserted into an electronic device, says Wagner. It will not happen tomorrow, but in the next ten years.

But at IBM, researchers like James Hannon are working to create a laboratory to speed up this process. Hannon considers the Wagner discovery an important step, but it is necessary to achieve the production of nanotubes of larger diameter.

“From a scientific point of view, this is a good demonstration, but from a logical point of view, this is not yet applicable,” said Hannon, manager of the IBM Carbon Electronics Group. - "I would like to see if this method will work if I increase the diameter."

Last year, Hannon and his colleagues at IBM announced that they had built memory chips and a microprocessor using carbon nanotubes. The scientist said that problems arose with putting them in a straight line, but IBM overcame these obstacles by creating special grooves engraved on the surface of the silicon chip and bonding agent.

Hannon says there are several problems with carbon nanotubes: figure out how to place them and how to separate semiconductor samples from metal ones that need to be thrown away. A separate team from the University of North Carolina recently reported that it was able to integrate carbon nanotubes into a flexible framework for silicon batteries, which work much longer than modern lithium-ion batteries.

Hannon expects carbon nanotubes to play a large role in electronics in the next few years. With such developments, phones with interchangeable fillings will be just around the corner.

The article is based on materials https://hi-news.ru/phone/telefony-na-osnove-ugleroda-na-podxode.html.