Tiny Tech #38: Graphene and Your Display Screen – A Clear Choice

Today from the world of Tiny Tech:

Cell phones and other mobile electronic devices are everywhere. Manufacturing them in large numbers, however, depends on the availability of rare elements that increasingly are in short supply. For example, the light emitting material in display screens must be situated between two layers of electrodes, and one of these electrodes must be transparent so you can see the display when it lights up. At present, the transparent electrode is a thin film of indium-tin-oxide, but indium is so rare that there already have been critical supply shortages.

Scientists have recently demonstrated that graphene, an all-carbon material made of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in hexagons, may be able to replace the transparent indium-tin-oxide electrodes in electronic displays. Remarkably, they were able to construct a display using graphene which had identical performance to displays using indium-tin-oxide.

This means that in the future, electronic devices could be manufactured in a more sustainable manner using graphene as a transparent electrode. I think that using graphene in this way would be a clear advance in microelectronics, don’t you?

Tiny Tech is made possible by the National Science Foundation and WUFT. To learn more about Tiny Tech, go to tinytechradio.org.

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