The medium article links to a nature article which explains in depth: <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-017-0010-z" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-017-0010-z</a><p>This seems like an interesting development, but the performance gain appears to be limited to low value inductors in the 10's of GHz range. Those inductors are already very small and easily integrated on RF ICs.<p>If you want to miniaturize electronics you need to miniaturize the inductors used in power conversion, which typically operate in the KHz to low MHz range. It's a very different problem.
It's definitely a great development, but I don't understand the "trillion dollar" comment at the beginning. Near as I can tell, inductors are about a $4-5 billion dollar market [0]<p>I know it will help miniaturization, but it seems like devices most desirable for miniaturization are already most limited by other conditions like the battery in smart phones and laptops. Larger inductors seem to appear mostly in things like power supplies-- sure we'd like smaller power bricks, but I don't understand how it translates to trillions of dollars.<p>[0]<a href="https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/inductor-market-212700102.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/inductor-ma...</a>
This will be a bigger deal when they get better effective carrier mass. It reads like intercalating more boron, or maybe a better choice or mix of elements, will yield increasingly better results. 50% is a big enough initial effect to be very encouraging. It is not clear from the article if there is any theoretical upper limit.<p>In the meantime, making the biggest part of a circuit
33% smaller might make the whole circuit almost that much smaller.<p>The value of these things is greatest manipulating signals at very high frequencies, far out of reach of digital signal processing. It is probably not notably useful for power conversion, where the exchange of energy via actual magnetic fields is what does the useful work.
So many hyperbolic claims that boil down to a moderate 33% area benefit with very little data about mundane things like long-term reliability, or process variation.<p>Every time an article mentions some buzzword like 'graphene', it turns out to be just a load of baloney. Graphene can do everything but leave the lab.
Does this give a better space saving than a gyrator? <a href="https://www.sites.google.com/site/roelarits/home/gyrator" rel="nofollow">https://www.sites.google.com/site/roelarits/home/gyrator</a>
It mentions 50 percent greater inductance than a a regular coil. Which is great, but would only reduce the size by a third.<p>I imagine this has some use cases that would merit the higher cost (graphene is expensive, right?). But probably not many.
Whenever there is a new hyped tech, it's always using graphene. But how close are we to actually deploying graphene-based components to mass market?