Now, in a lucky and perhaps game-changing discovery, scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) have found that placing graphene on top of common industrial-grade glass is a cheap and effective way of making it resilient and tunable, paving the way for the production of graphene-based electronics on a large scale.

One of the reasons for silicon's success in the semiconductor industry is that it is easily fine-tuned via a process known as "doping." This involves adding tiny concentrations (as low as a few parts per billion) of positively or negatively charged impurities that tweak silicon's electrical properties. Doping is a great tool to fit a semiconductor to a specific application, even though it is a delicate and costly process that adds to the material's complexity and can decrease its lifespan.

Graphene has excellent electrical, thermal and mechanical properties that would make it a vast improvement over silicon in many areas.