Graphene enables clock rates in the terahertz range

Graphene is considered a promising candidate for the nanoelectronics of the future. In theory, it should allow clock rates up to a thousand times faster than today's silicon-based electronics. Scientists from the Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE), and the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P), have now shown that graphene can actually convert electronic signals with frequencies in the gigahertz range extremely efficiently into signals with several times higher frequency.