Katia Moskvitch in Scientific American:
It is certain that silicon will be used for transistors—semiconductor devices that are the building blocks of modern computers—for at least the next five to 10 years. But people are already thinking about possible alternative materials and technologies to replace silicon when it will fail to deliver for increasingly smaller and smaller transistors. A graphene transistor is one of the alternatives.
I’m also looking into other one-atom-thick 2-D materials that were obtained soon after graphene and at heterostructures based on those 2-D crystals. Potentially they can provide an alternative to silicon technologies, but here we’re talking about completely new architecture rather than just introducing a new material into the system. It’s hard to predict how it will develop because when you introduce one new material into a process, it’s already quite a complicated step, and if you want to change the whole architecture, it requires years of research. That’s why research should start now if we want to achieve something like that in 10 years’ time.
What do you think computers of the future could look like?
Computers are much more than just a display, interface and software: they are mainly about computing power and microprocessors—also known as the central processing unit [CPU], or the “brain” of a computer. In the future, we’ll probably expand the parallel computations, utilizing microprocessors with larger number of cores, when several CPUs will be working together on the same chip, enabling the computer to perform many more tasks with a much greater overall system performance. At the same time more specialized computers will start to appear because the cost won’t be so prohibitive anymore.
More here.