A recipe for nanoporous graphene

Nanoporous graphene created from molecular precursors shows promise for electronic applications Graphene is widely regarded as a promising material for electronic applications because the exceptionally high mobilities of its charge carriers enable extremely fast transistors ( 1 ). However, the lack of an energy band gap in graphene limits its use in logic applications; without a band gap, the devices remain highly conductive at any gate voltage and thus cannot be fully switched off. Researchers have therefore turned their attention to semiconducting forms of graphene that have the necessary band gap to enable transistors with high on-off ratios. On page 199 of this issue, Moreno et al. ( 2 ) report on the synthesis and device characterization of nanoporous graphene with semiconducting properties.