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The UCLA team has developed a new fabrication process for graphene transistors using a nanowire as the self-aligned gate. Self-aligned gates are devices used to amplify and switch electronic signals and were developed to deal with problems of misalignment encountered because of the shrinking scale of electronics.

8220;First,it doesn8221;t produce any appreciable defects in the graphene during fabrication,so the high carrier mobility is retained, Nature quoted Xiangfeng Duan as saying.

Second,by using a self-aligned approach with a nanowire as the gate,the group was able to overcome alignment difficulties previously encountered and fabricate very short-channel devices with unprecedented performance,8221; he added.

These advances allowed the team to demonstrate the highest speed graphene transistors to date,with a cut-off frequency up to 300 GHz.

8220;We are very excited about our approach and the results,and we are currently taking additional efforts to scale up the approach and further boost the speed.8221; said Lei Liao,a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA.

The paper is published Sept. 1 in the journal Nature.