Asia's quietly conquering the graphene market

Check out CambridgeIP's pages on graphene, and a list of the top 10 holders of graphene patents tell the story. A patent search done by CambridgeIP on 1 February 2013 revealed that the leading graphene patent owners come from just three countries, four from the US (including IBM, Sandisk and Xerox), two academic institutions in China, and two from Korea, including Samsung.
 
The wonder material, discovered only in 2004, is the basis for a race for a whole slew of new applications. Graphene provider Graphenea explains on its website that it is "the thinnest compound known to man at one atom thick, the lightest material known... the strongest compound discovered... the best conductor of heat at room temperature...", so very much a material that could change the way we work and play.

Source: NTU. The inventor of the graphene sensor, Assistant Professor Wang Qijie, from NTU’s School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering

In May 2013, Nanyang Technological University (NTU) announced that it had designed a graphene sensor made from graphene alone. The sensor is 1,000 times more sensitive to light than current low-cost imaging sensors found in today’s compact cameras, and uses 10 times less energy as it operates at lower voltages. The sensor is also more powerful than existing sensors in that it can detect a very broad spectrum of light, from the visible to mid-infrared, enabling its use not only in infrared cameras, but also traffic speed cameras, and for satellite imaging.  

Other academic institutions are getting into the game as well. The National University of Singapore and BASF announced a partnership in January 2014 to look into joint graphene research involving organic electronic devices, for example.
Don't expect commercial graphene-based applications to come very cheap, however. A single square cm of Graphenea's monolayer graphene on various substrates costs about 44 Euros according to its website. This is lower than the year before, according to a January 2014 blog post. And if you need some, Graphenea has already signed up a Southeast Asian distributor as of February 2014, Insight interasia.