Digital Core Design, the world-famous design laboratory in Bytom, Poland, has developed the world’s first processor made of graphene – the BYT-ON.
Discovered in 2004, graphene
is an allotrope of carbon. Its structure is one-atom-thick planar
sheets of carbon atoms that are densely packed in a honeycomb crystal
lattice. Graphene differs from most conventional materials. Intrinsic
graphene is a semi-metal or zero-gap semiconductor. The E-k relation is
linear for low energies near the six corners of the two-dimensional
hexagonal Brillouin zone, leading to zero effective mass for electrons
and holes. Due to this linear dispersion relationship at low energies,
electrons and holes near these six points behave like relativistic
particles described by the Dirac equation for spin 1/2 particles.
The
end result is that graphene-based conductors can transport electronic
signals at relativistic speeds, while graphene-based transistors can
switch many orders of magnitude faster than their conventional
silicon-based counterparts, all while consuming minimal power. In fact,
graphene is such an amazing material that the Nobel Prize in Physics for
2010 was awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at the
University of Manchester "For groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene".
Use
of graphene in Digital Core Design’ BYT-ON processor represents a
breakthrough in electronics. The traditional silicon structure used to
build conventional integrated circuits has been replaced with polycyclic
aromatic hydrocarbons. “We commenced our tests just before the end of 2011, and the results far exceeded our expectations,” notes Tomasz Ćwienk, the spokesman for Digital Core Design. "We
replaced the existing processor in one of the newest tablets available
on the market with our graphene-based BYT-ON processor. We knew that the
BYT-ON’s power-consumption was going to be minimal, but we were amazed
to discover that the tablet ran all the way from the beginning of
January 2012 until the end of March 2012 – three full months – without
our having to recharge the battery.”
These
revolutionary results were possible due to the combination of the
Digital Core Design’s proprietary architecture (which is the outcome of
12 years of the company’s experience) and the graphene itself, which
opens new possibilities for the electronic industry. The architecture
implemented in the BYT-ON processor is called CISKoRISK 2nd Generation –
it performs all operations with speeds reaching up 99.13% the speed of
light, while maintaining 99.85% lower power consumption than
conventional silicon-based equivalents.
Editor’s Note:The
rumor on the streets is that the world’s top ten FPGA vendors are
already in secret consultations with Digital Core Design with regard to
the application of the BYT-ON’s underlying graphene transistor structure
as the basis for next-generation FPGAs. One tremendous advantage of
this technology for FPGA applications is that memory cells (including
configuration cells) constructed out of graphene transistors switch
orders of magnitude faster than SRAM, have orders of magnitude higher
density than DRAM, and the non-volatility of Flash, all while consuming
almost zero power.Furthermore, graphene-based transistorsare immune to radiation events, making this technology ideal for aerospace applications including deep-space probes.