There’s been growing interest in a material called graphene that could revolutionize the way smartphones look and work. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Apple, Samsung, and Google are all chasing patents and other intellectual property rights for the material--not to mention finding ways to increase its usefulness and, ultimately, commercialise it. But just what is graphene and why is it so revolutionary? Here’s everything you need to know.
What Is It?
Graphene was first created ten years ago by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester. They won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for their work. Graphene is actually made from graphite--the stuff you find in pencils. Only graphene is spread so thin it’s only a few atoms thick--that’s one million times thinner than a sheet of paper. Graphene is so thin it was actually classified as two dimensional and it is virtually invisible to the naked eye.
What Benefits Does It Have?
If graphene is 1/1,000,000th the thickness of a piece of paper you would naturally expect it to be very weak. However in reality it is just the opposite. Graphene is actually stronger than steel. Not only that, it is capable of being folded, crumbled, and rolled up without losing its strength or the ability to return to its original form.
More than that it also has amazing electricity conduction properties. It’s better able to send electrical impulses than silicon--the current champ used in our computer chips--and can even deliver data over the Internet up to 100 times faster on your smartphone than current networking technologies. Oh yeah, and graphene used in batteries gives them the capabilities to be charged from zero to full in just 15 minutes and would also give a battery the size of the current iPhone one week of battery life.
Given all its fantastic properties, it’s no wonder the world’s three biggest tech companies are furiously working to bring graphene components to smartphones.
But How Could It Change The Smartphone?
Imagine a smartphone from the wildest science fiction movie. It would be one which is less than one millimeter thin and can be folded up and shoved in your shirt pocket. Its display is sharper and clearer than any Retina display is capable of today and it hardly ever needs to be recharged.
Graphene makes that science fiction smartphone a reality. The most obvious starter use of graphene is in a smartphone display. Since it conducts electricity so well it can make touch screens more responsive and also allow them to draw less power, increasing battery life. Given that graphene is only a few atoms thick, a graphene display can reduce the thickness of a current smartphone by 20% immediately--and that’s before graphene is even used in the body of the device or its internal components.
But more than making the smartphone thinner, it could actually lead to the end of smartphones--that is devices between 4-6-inches in size--as we know them. Since graphene can be folded and rolled up without being damaged, smartphones of the future could have the capabilities to be folded out from a 5-inch (or even 1-inch) screen to a screen the size of the current iPad. We’ll no longer have to decided what sized device we want to carry with us. We can have multiple screen sizes in one device.
But it’s not just smartphones that will benefit from graphene. The material could fuel the wearable tech revolution. Displays--even batteries--could be built into everything from car windows to our t-shirts--and we wouldn’t even notice. And forget Google Glass. We’re talking Google Contact Lenses.
Who’s Using Graphene?
Every tech company with an eye on the future--and other industries ranging from medical to defense as well. In tech the biggest players are Samsung, which owns 38 graphene patents (and gthis figure is expanding), and Apple and Google. You thought the smartphone patent wars were annoying? Just wait until the graphene patent wars begin.
Who Is Hong Byung Hee and Why Is He So Important?
Hong Byung Hee is a professor at Seoul National University. He created a technique--and owns the patent for--mass-producing graphene-based displays, the primary area of interest for tech companies. The fact that Hee has figured out how to turn graphene into displays and owns the patent on it makes him the most popular guy in the world as far as the tech giants are concerned.
As Hee recently told Bloomberg: "Global technology companies are facing innovation limits in hardware and design, and in order to step over to the next level, they need to adopt new materials like graphene. Our key graphene technology is receiving considerable interest from firms including Apple, Samsung and even Google.”
But in a fiscally smart move, Hee says he won’t sell his patents to any one tech company. Instead, he’ll license the technology.
The Challenges
The reason you don’t have a graphene smartphone right now is because the material still has some challenges to be worked out. Namely it’s difficult to manufacture on a large scale. So right now they can make a lot of small batches of perfect graphene displays or large batches of, well, crappy ones.
But Samsung has recently said it has had a breakthrough in producing graphene in larger batches and other researchers are working on different approaches around the world.
So When Can I Get A Graphene Phone?
Best guess? Fall of 2016. So that puts it as the iPhone 8 and Samsung Galaxy S8. I know that having such a wonder material in just a few short years may sound unbelievable, but it's possible because pretty much every scientist and technology executive really believes this material will change our lives on the scale of how electricity did--so everyone is throwing a ton of money into research and development. More money equals faster progress. Then, as soon as the manufacturing kinks are ironed out all that’s left is commercialization.
We're sure you'll agree 2016 can’t get here soon enough.
by pbriden via Featured Articles
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