Is there anything graphene can’t improve? New research into the wonder material has led to the development of a device that aims to drastically improve many aspects of the internet of things (IoT).

As you have probably read many times, minute IoT devices that will be capable of transmitting data from cities and farmlands are the future, but getting them to the stage where they are almost self-sufficient is the end-goal.

While significant developments have been made within IoT devices using traditional silicon, limitations crop up soon enough, particularly when it comes to transmitting data over frequency bands.

Works at very low voltage

With most devices using the MEMS or MOS standard, the range of frequencies that they can achieve are typically in the lower levels, which also means a lower speed of data transmission.

Now, however, researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPLF) in Switzerland – which recently announced the development of a machine that makes non-stop wine – have announced a new graphene device that could help IoT devices reach unprecedented speeds.

Publishing their work in the journal Nanoletters, the team has revealed that this device is designed to replace tuneable capacitors by allowing it to tune the circuits to different frequencies so that they can operate across a wide range of frequency bands, including high frequencies above 2.1GHz.

Based on a sandwich structure, the device takes advantage of the fact that a two-dimensional gas of electrons in a quantum well can behave like a quantity referred to as quantum capacitance, which allows it to tune the device to multiple frequencies by applying a very low voltage.

“It’s by applying voltage that we can ‘tune’ our capacitors to a given frequency, just like tuning a radio to get different stations,” said Clara Moldovan, the lead author of the study.