‘Once we de-laminated it, the silicene fully encapsulated,’ adds Akinwande. The team then de-laminated the silver–silicene–aluminium oxide sandwich from the silicate. Once the silicene has been made, it is coated with aluminium oxide which protects it from degradation in air. This process is conducted under vacuum, with the silver film layered on top of a silicate substrate. ‘You basically evaporate silicon atoms onto a crystalline silver surface,’ he tells Chemistry World. He goes on to explain that silicene contains ‘dangling bonds’ that allow it to quickly degrade in air.Īkinwande and his colleagues avoided this issue by developing a new manufacturing process for silicene. ‘The great challenge for these non-planar 2D crystals is that they’re very sensitive to their environment,’ says Deji Akinwande from the University of Texas, US. ‘It may be much easier to integrate silicene-based structures or layers into this technology.’īut silicene is very hard to produce. ‘Electronics are still based on silicon,’ explains Patrick Vogt from the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, who was not involved in the research. But silicene, first produced in 2012, may provide a better route to superior electrical performance by virtue of its compatibility with current electronics manufacturing. Phosphorene and germanene have both been grown from their three-dimensional counterparts in the hope they can usurp conventional semiconductors and be integrated into processors.
Over the past decade, the emergence of graphene has stimulated interest in producing two-dimensional allotropes of other elements. The transistor was created on a two-dimensional silicon material known as silicene, which has exceptional electrical performance that may even rival graphene. The world’s first one-atom-thick silicon transistor has been made by scientists in the US.
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