[gaze]

There’s a few reasons for this. There’s a few ways to make graphene. You can use CVD or you can use mechanical exfoliation. Mechanical exfoliation requires scotch tape and scales to maybe a flake per hour per grad student. CVD is quite scalable but makes shitty graphene. A lot of graphene breakthroughs (superconductivity for instance) needs mechanically exfoliated graphene.

Secondly, process fab is VERY conservative. There’s numerous amazing ferroelectrics that you can grow tons of that would absolutely spank NAND flash. However, they’re not silicon fab, so nobody makes them.

[tbrownaw]

> There’s numerous amazing ferroelectrics that you can grow tons of that would absolutely spank NAND flash. However, they’re not silicon fab, so nobody makes them.

So why doesn't somebody new start making them and put all the current flash producers out of business?

[throwaway48476]

Silicon technology is already so efficient it would be hugely expensive to compete with it. No one has the money or risk appetite to try.

[jiggawatts]

I’d love a reference or two to read on ferroelectric memory tech…

[gaze]

You might just look for work on HfO2

[Uehreka]

> scotch tape

Is there actually a special property of scotch tape that makes it the ideal candidate over some more specialized industrial adhesive? Or are these references to scotch tape generally just references to the fact that you _can_ use scotch tape like the original graphene experiment?

[indolering]

The latter. A "super" material worthy of a novel prize being produced using common office supplies is just a fun thing to throw into a story.

[gaze]

It happens to have a good level of stickiness. People also use blue nitto tape, and tape used for fixturing on dicing saws. I think basically anything could work, it's just that people use what's lying around.

[dehrmann]

But scotch tape is nearly as cheap as grad students.