Samsung makes major breakthrough in new “wonder material”

Samsung has made a breakthrough in a new ‘wonder material’ poised to build the next generation of wearable technology. The company’s biggest brains have cooked up a technique for growing graphene on a larger scale that could take the atom-thin material from the lab to the real world. The wild-haired white coats at Samsung’s Advanced Institute of Technology and Sungkyunkwan University say they’ve synthesised a crystal of graphene that retains its charge across a larger area.

Graphene. It was going to reinvigorate the electronics industry. Better than silicon, flexible yet more durable than steel and with high heat conduction, it all sounded like The Dream for thinner components and wearables.. but it kinda faded away. Well, it’s back, according to Samsung. In a partnership with Sungkyunkwan University, it reckons it’s solved the tricky issue of manufacturing “large area, single crystal wafer scale graphene,” or simply: big, thin sheets of it. Manufacturing methods in the past have reduced the electric and mechanic benefits associated with the material — one reason it’s taken so long to be commercialized and, you know, appear in for real, for sale things. Samsung’s involvement should mean it could actually happen.