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The Development of Epitaxial Graphene For 21st Century Electronics

Graphene has been known for a long time but only recently has its potential for electronics been recognized. Its history is recalled starting from early graphene studies. A critical insight in June, 2001 brought to light that graphene could be used for electronics. This was followed by a series of proposals and measurements. The Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT) graphene electronics research project was first funded, by Intel in 2003, and later by the NSF in 2004 and the Keck foundation in 2008. The GIT group selected epitaxial graphene as the most viable route for graphene based electronics and their seminal paper on transport and structural measurements of epitaxial graphene was published in 2004. Subsequently, the field rapidly developed and multilayer graphene was discovered at GIT. This material consists of many graphene layers but it is not graphite: each layer has the electronic structure of graphene. Currently the field has developed to the point where epitaxial graphene based electronics may be realized in the not too distant future.