Graphene could buttress next-gen computer chip wiring [News]

Most of the hand-wringing over the fate of Moore's Law focuses on the ever-shrinking silicon transistor. But increasingly researchers are concerned with another critical part of the infrastructure: the copper wires that connect individual transistors to form complex circuits. At the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco in December, researchers described the coming problems for copper interconnects and debated ways of getting around them. One approach, studied by a group led by Stanford electrical engineer H.-S. Philip Wong, is to gird copper with graphene. Wong's group found that the nanomaterial can alleviate a major problem facing copper, called electromigration.