Professor Brian Derby
Professor of Material Science: nanostructured materials, biomaterials, ceramics and glasses
There’s a lot of interest in print electronics, that is, large area electronic devices; a good example is the mobile phone. The display has lots and lots of pixels and then behind each pixel we have light emitting diodes, roughly 10 000 transistors and LEDs all packed into this very active and extremely expensive-to-produce display. That’s large area electronics.
You’ve probably heard of Moore’s Law, which says every two years, the power of a computer doubles. What that effectively means is the computing bit of your mobile phone is getting smaller and smaller. Now, it’s believed that current polymers aren’t going to be fast enough. So one of the applications for 2D materials such as graphene, is to make a printable, faster piece of electronics using inkjet technology.
Traditional ink is just colour, but graphene can act as a conductor of electricity. It’s also incredibly thin and so lets a lot of light through. We can also see through graphene and that offers all kinds of possibilities. We’re trying to develop printing techniques with graphene which produce large area information in mobile and TV displays and also newspapers.