The foundation of the accelerating progress in technologies that we've seen over the past four decades is due to the relentless advance of Moore's Law.  However, experts now foresee that by the year 2030, the density of silicon computing and the associated increases in chip frequency will be exhausted.

While other materials, like molybdenite, represent possible alternatives, graphene is the wonder material most likely to solve the problem of making ever-faster computers and smaller mobile devices when current silicon microchip technology hits the wall.

Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms in a tight hexagonal arrangement with theoretical speeds 100 times greater than silicon. But transforming graphene into microchips that can outperform current silicon technology has proven difficult.

The answer may lie in new nanoscale systems based on ultra-thin layers of materials with exotic properties. Called two-dimensional layered materials, these systems could be important for microelectronics, various types of hyper-sensitive sensors, catalysis, tissue engineering, and energy storage.

As described in the journal ACS Nano, researchers at Penn State have applied a two-dimensional combination of graphene and hexagonal boron nitride to produce improved transistor performance at an industrially relevant scale.

This is the first time engineers have been able to use boron and graphene to make transistors at "wafer scale": from 3 to 12 inches in diameter. In the article, the Penn State team describes a method for integrating a thin layer of graphene only one or two atoms thick, with a second layer of hexagonal boron nitride with a thickness varying between a few atoms and several hundred atoms.

The resulting bi-layer material constitutes the next step in creating functional graphene field-effect transistors for high-frequency electronic and opto-electronic devices.

In the near future, the Penn State team hopes to demonstrate graphene-based integrated circuits and high-performance devices suitable for industrial-scale manufacturing on 100mm wafers.

Best of all, since the process uses standard lithography techniques, it's compatible with current processing technology while offering a six-to-nine times performance boost.