Samsung makes Graphene commercially viable

With the advent of curved and flexible displays, companies who do the development and discovery of new technology in order for new tech to be commercially viable has been hard at work trying to look for the support materials needed for these tech to work properly and are cost efficient. In South Korea, Samsung, together with SungKyunKwan University, has discovered a new way of making graphene commercially viable.

Graphene has 100 times greater electron mobility than that of Silicon. Also, it is more durable than steel and is more flexible and has a high heat conductibility which is perfect for Samsung's flexible AMOLED displays.

"Through its partnership with Sungkyungkwan University’s School of Advanced Materials Science and Engineering, SAIT uncovered a new method of growing large area, single crystal wafer scale graphene. Engineers around the world have invested heavily in research for the commercialization of graphene, but have faced many obstacles due to the challenges associated with it. In the past, researchers have found that multi-crystal synthesis – the process of synthesizing small graphene particles to produce large-area graphene – deteriorated the electric and mechanical properties of the material, limiting its application range and making it difficult to commercialize.

The new method developed by SAIT and Sungkyunkwan University synthesizes large-area graphene into a single crystal on a semiconductor, maintaining its electric and mechanical properties. The new method repeatedly synthesizes single crystal graphene on the current semiconductor wafer scale.

Over the past several decades, the growth of the semiconductor industry has been driven by the ability to grow the area of a silicon wafer, while steadily decreasing the process node. In order to commercialize graphene to displace the industry’s reliance on silicon, it is vital to develop a new method to grow a single crystal graphene into a large area."

The impact? I really do not know, but I am pretty sure this will really speed up and help the flexible display industry move forward. Since this is an essential part of making Flexible AMOLED displays then I believe this will make devices with flexible displays in the future cheap.