So there are two announcements here that the register has 'helpfully' combined into one article:
A graphene transistor operating at 100 GHz, with a relatively large size device.
A nanotube transistor fabricated with a 10 nanometer long nanotube.
Carbon nanotubes are great stuff, and have a bunch of potentially useful applications, but they are not going to be bread-and-butter electronic, probably ever. They will likely be relegated to the same style of niche applications that exotic semiconductors currently occupy -- applications like microwave amplifiers and mixers. Growth of carbon nanotubes is still essentially a random process. As far as I know, every nanotube device is built by one of three methods. First, grow a bunch of nanotubes on a wafer. Throw it in an SEM and see where the nanotubes are, then build your devices on top of them. The second method is to build a device on a silicon wafer with contact pads, grow your nanotubes nearby, then use a nanomanipulator to place the nanotubes across the pads. The final possibility is basically prayer: you build a device, chuck some nanotubes on it, and hope that one lands in the right place.
As you can imagine, none of the those methods is really commercially viable, at least beyond high margin devices for special applications. Even then you can really only do it for a handful of nanotubes per circuit.
Graphene is like a fab friendly version of nanotubes. It has similarly useful electronic properties, but it can already be grown in single-layer thickness over relatively large areas. I wouldn't bet on it replacing silicon anytime soon, but it is at least plausible that we could see something like a graphene CPU, although I wouldn't hazard a guess as to when. Graphene so far has been a blockbuster success. While a great many other technologies including the other novel carbon structures like nanotubes and buckyballs have shown great promise and been hailed as silicon killers, they have all run into problem after problem. Graphene has gone from discovery to nearly application ready in record time, and it shows incredible promise, but it still is mostly promise. There is also definitely a lot of 'if all you have is a hammer' syndrome surrounding graphene. In the frenzy to test every conceivable property of graphene, people have tended to get caught up in the idea that graphene is the best material in the world at everything. So you have to exercise a degree of healthy skepticism about many of the claims.
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