Scientists have discovered that ultra-lightweight carbon nanostructure-based nanocomposite materials outperform conventional metal shielding due to their lighter weight, cost efficiency, flexibility and resistance to corrosion. The research is an attempt to overcome the weight issue of traditional metal-based EMI shielding in electronic devices in order to produce smaller and lighter electronics. Now, Korean scientists have taken the research a step further by successfully demonstrating that single-layer graphene may be the ideal choice of material for high-performance EMI shielding.
Led by Byung Jin Cho, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), the team of scientists developed CVD-synthesized graphene that exhibited an EMI shielding effectiveness of 40 percent. According to Cho, the “ideal monolayer graphene [could] shield as much as 97.8 percent of incident waves.” He adds that this finding is significant because “it means that graphene is the most effective material for EMI shielding in terms of shielding effectiveness per mass.” Though previous experiments have been performed with regards to the effectiveness of graphene as EMI shielding material, researchers used graphene flakes obtained by the reduction of graphene oxide; the KAIST team is the first team to experiment with monolayer graphene.
The KAIST team predicts that due to the lightweight, flexible, thin and transparent properties of graphene, it will be an excellent choice of EMI shielding material in portable electronic devices, transparent electronics, automobiles and EMI isolation of 3D integrated circuits.
