Nokia begins work on graphene, world's strongest material

Forget diamonds, graphene is now the world's hardest material. And all sorts of developers most likely want to get their hands on it.

Nokia looks to be ahead of the game in this graphene race. The Finnish mobile-phone maker announced today that it was one of the recipients of a $1.35 billion grant from the European Union to do research and development on the supermaterial over the next 10 years.

"Nokia is proud to be involved with this project, and we have deep roots in the field -- we first started working with graphene already in 2006," Nokia's CTO Henry Tirri said in a statement. "Since then, we have come to identify multiple areas where this material can be applied in modern computing environments. We've done some very promising work so far, but I believe the greatest innovations have yet to be discovered."

Besides being the hardest substance in the world -- 300 times stronger than steel -- graphene has all sorts of other noteworthy qualities. It is also the thinnest object ever obtained by man -- measuring just one atom thick -- and the lightest. It is made of a 2D crystal and looks a bit like scotch tape, only infinitely thinner. Graphene is also transparent, bendable, and a far better conductor than copper.

If Nokia is successful in its development of the material, it will be able to build cell phones that are extremely light, durable, and less susceptible to overheating.

"When we talk about graphene, we've reached a tipping point. We're now looking at the beginning of a graphene revolution," Jani Kivioja, a research leader at Nokia Research Center, said in the statement. "Before this point in time, we figured out a way to manufacture cheap iron that led to the Industrial Revolution. Then there was silicon. Now it's time for graphene."

Graphene battery research by Samsung experiences breakthrough in manufacturing process

Battery innovation has been stuck in the lithium ion age over the past few decades, and progress towards a better battery has hardly moved at all when compared to exponential jumps in storage space, memory capacity and processor computing speeds. However, in the recent past, graphene (similar to a pencil’s graphite) has enjoyed success in solving some of the roadblocks of lithium ion technology. In fact, the potential output of the material far outlasts and exceeds the capacity of traditional lithium ion in terms of volume and weight. On top of that, the material is flexible and can be adapted in new flexible displays. However, the reason we haven’t seen devices using graphene yet is due to difficulties in the implementation of the delicate processes involved in building graphene layers on a large manufacturing scale.

According to the post on Samsung’s blog, it seems Samsung has finally grasped the manufacturing process, and stated that in partnership with Sungkyunkwan University, SAID (Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology) has become the first group of researchers to harness the benefits of graphene on a large scale manufacturing platform. The process is designed to overcome previous problems which included deteriorating electric properties. The breakthrough was accomplished by synthesizing “large area graphene onto a single crystal on a semiconductor, maintaining its electrical and mechanical properties.”

Samsung and Sungkyunkwan University have been working on graphene and other nano research since 2006, and the partnership has yielded the most awaited leap in efficient energy management. We will see the technology decrease the size of our phones and tablets further, as well as power smart watches and even allow tiny devices to achieve incredible battery life. As processors make the switch to 14 nanometer processes, and flexible devices are becoming popular, the world is finally ready for a revolutionary change in how often we charge our devices, and what types of efficiency we will expect from them in the future.