Much-hyped graphene electronics will not totally replace silicon systems, according to a researcher honoured this week for his work in the area. But Walt de Heer of Georgia Tech, Atlanta, who was yesterday awarded the Materials Research Society (MRS) Medal, says devices utilising the next-gen technology could be just a couple of years away, and could herald serious growth in ‘molecular electronics’.

De Heer says that organic electronics – the making of electronics out of carbon – has been hamstrung by the lack of the “right leads” to connect up components. Graphene ribbons could be the answer.

“Organic electronics are going to make a comeback,” he predicts.

In theory graphene – a single layer of carbon atoms – could allow chips to run faster and cooler than silicon. Silicon chips are fast approaching their limits and graphene might allow the computer industry to keep following the famous Moore’s Law, which roughly states that the power of computer chips will double every two years. But it will not kill off its predecessor, says de Heer.

Yesterday de Heer was awarded the MRS Medal for “his pioneering contributions to the science and technology of epitaxial graphene”. It joins an impressive list of his honours.

“The emergence of graphene is sometimes presented as a replacement for silicon,” he told the MRS autumn meeting in Boston. “That’s not really the case.”

De Heer, who holds the first-ever patent on graphene electronics, likes to compare graphene and silicon technology to airplanes and ships. The appearance of planes did not mean the extinction of ships, nor will graphene electronics totally replace silicon.

Eventually, he said, there will likely be a bifurcation of electronics, but “silicon will be there forever”.

“At the moment graphene is at the Wright brothers stage,” he cautions, with much more work needed before it can be really useful.

Even so, certain devices could be just a couple of years away. These early uses will probably be for high-frequency electronics, possibly military (such as radios), and are likely to be expensive, he told Nature.

Even reaching this point has been fraught with problems.

Researchers have previously tried to use carbon nanotubes to build electronics, but this presents problems with placing the nanotubes in the right place and connecting them up. By using graphene sheets – which can (theoretically at least) be thought of as unrolled carbon tubes – de Heer found it was possible to make ribbons of carbon that shared many of the useful electrical properties of nanotubes but which could much more easily be connected together and shaped.

Earlier this year his team reported in Nature Nanotechnology that they had developed a method to put 10,000 graphene transistors on a 0.24-centimetre square of silicon, “the largest density of graphene devices reported to date”, they noted.

“What this is all about is the end of the silicon era,” de Heer told the MRS.