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APRIL 2012 issue n°128THE DISRUPTIVE SEMICONDUCTOR TECHNOLOGIES MAGAZINENANOTECHNOLOGYCRANN and Thomas Swan partner on graphene productionCollaborative research partnership worth €750,000 focusing on the industrial scale-up of graphene production.CRANN, the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI)funded nanoscience institute based at TrinityCollege Dublin, has announced a newcollaborative research partnership worth €750,000 withThomas Swan & Co, an independent manufacturer ofperformance and speciality chemicals, based in thenorth east of England. The collaboration will focus onthe industrial scale-up of graphene production.Graphene is the wonder material of modern scienceand was the focus of the Nobel Prize in 2010. It hasunique properties and is both the strongest and mostconductive material known to man. There are manypotential applications for graphene including nextgeneration electronic devices, mechanicallystrengthened plastics and new thermoelectric materials.Graphene is the focus of one of six of the EU’s FETFlagship Pilot research projects, two of which will bechosen to receive funding of €1 billion for 10 years fromthe EU Commission.CRANN’s research in the fi eld of graphene productionis led by Professor Jonathan Coleman, who was namedas SFI Researcher of the Year in 2011 and is alsorecognised as one of the top 100 material scientists ofthe last decade – the only Irish representative on thelist. There is currently no method to produce high qualitypure graphene on an industrial scale and thecollaboration between CRANN and Thomas Swan aimsto address this problem. CRANN has been identifi edby Thomas Swan as the leading academic research siteglobally for solution processing of graphene and thepartner of choice around this challenging research area.Thomas Swan, in addition to funding the researchprogramme, will place an engineer to work withProfessor Coleman’s team for two years. Thispartnership between industry and academia is a modelfor how world leading technology developed in IrishUniversities can be exploited to provide both economicand societal benefi t.Prof Jonathan Coleman and Harry Swan, MD Thomas Swan.www.crann.tcd.ieAir Products completes acquisition in DuPont Air Products NanoMaterials LLC JVAir Products announced it had completed the acquisition of DuPont’s interest in DuPont Air Products NanoMaterialsLLC (DA NanoMaterials), the two companies’ 50-50 joint venture serving the global semiconductor and wafer polishingindustries. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.DA NanoMaterials manufactures chemicalmechanical planarization (CMP) slurries for thesemiconductor and wafer polishing industries.Headquartered in Tempe, Ariz., with regionalheadquarters in Hsinchu County, Taiwan, the companyoperates state-of-the-art applications and formulationlaboratories in Tempe and Taiwan. DA NanoMaterialshas established a portfolio of products for copper CMP,tungsten CMP, shallow trench isolation (STI) CMP andwafer polishing applications.The current market for CMP and wafer polishing slurriesis valued at more than $1 billion and is growing two timesas fast as the underlying semiconductor MSI index,which measures millions of square inches of siliconshipped.The DA NanoMaterials acquisition fi ts neatly with AirProducts’ other differentiated materials which serveadvanced technology nodes. In addition to the CMP andwafer polishing slurries it will now market, Air Productsalso offers a line of post-CMP cleaning solutionsdesigned to provide leading edge cleaning performance.Last year Air Products acquired Poly-Flow Engineering(PFE), an equipment manufacturer in Albuquerque,N.M., that produces a line of CMP delivery and blendingequipment for semiconductor manufacturers.Air Products provides atmospheric, process andspecialty gases; performance materials; equipment;and technology. For over 70 years, the company hasenabled customers to become more productive, energyeffi cient and sustainable. More than 18,000 employeesin over 40 countries supply innovative solutions to theenergy, environment and emerging markets. Theseinclude semiconductor materials, refi nery hydrogen,coal gasification, natural gas liquefaction, and advancedcoatings and adhesives. In fiscal 2011, Air Products hadsales of $10.1 billion.www.airproducts.comGraphene for faster & cheaper cooling of electronic devicesA North Carolina State University researcher has developed a more efficient, less expensive way of cooling electronicdevices – particularly devices that generate a lot of heat, such as lasers and power devices.The technique uses a “heat spreader” made ofa copper-graphene composite, which isattached to the electronic device using anindium-graphene interface fi lm “Both the coppergrapheneand indium-graphene have higher thermalconductivity, allowing the device to cool effi ciently,”says Dr. Jag Kasichainula, an associate professor ofmaterials science and engineering at NC State andauthor of a paper on the research. Thermalconductivity is the rate at which a material conductsheat.In fact, Kasichainula found that the copper-graphenefilm’s thermal conductivity allows it to coolapproximately 25 percent faster than pure copper,which is what most devices currently use.Dissipating heat from electronic devices is important,because the devices become unreliable when theybecome too hot.The paper also lays out the manufacturing processfor creating the copper-graphene composite, usingan electrochemical deposition process. “The coppergraphenecomposite is also low-cost and easy toproduce,” Kasichainula says. “Copper is expensive,so replacing some of the copper with grapheneactually lowers the overall cost.”The paper, “Thermal Conductivity of Copper-Graphene Composite Films Synthesized byElectrochemical Deposition with Exfoliated GraphenePlatelets,” is published in Metallurgical and MaterialsTransactions B. The research was funded by theNational Science Foundation.http://news.ncsu.eduCopyrights © Yole Développement SA. All rights reserved - Recycled paper19