A group of MIT boffins think that an experimental material called graphene may be able to boost the clock speed of computer chips into the 500-GHz to 1,000-GHz range.

According to a report issued by the MIT news office, Tomas Palacios, assistant professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) has been doing groundwork on using Graphene instead of silicon. Graphene is a form of pure carbon that was identified in 2004. It's only an atom thick.

Palacios, Jing Kong; Han Wang and Daniel Nezich, have constructed an experimental graphene chip capable of multiplying electrical signal frequencies. They say that frequency multiplication technology generate noisy signals and require significant filtering and power.

However the graphene chip uses only a single transistor and its output is clean, and needs no filtering. The chip has been clocked at speeds of between 500-1000 GHz. Palacios believes his chips will be in the shops in a year or two as soon as they can work out a way to grow graphene wafers suitable for use in electronic manufacturing.