Graphene integrated circuits: new prospects towards receiver realisation

Abstract

This work demonstrates a design approach which enables the fabrication of fully integrated radio frequency (RF) and millimetre-wave frequency direct-conversion graphene receivers by adapting the frontend architecture to exploit the state-of-the-art performance of the recently reported wafer-scale CVD metal-insulator-graphene (MIG) diodes. As a proof-of-concept, we built a fully integrated microwave receiver in the frequency range 2.1-2.7 GHz employing the strong nonlinearity and the high responsivity of MIG diodes to successfully receive and demodulate complex, digitally modulated communication signals at 2.45 GHz. In addition, the fabricated receiver uses zero-biased MIG diodes and consumes zero dc power. With the flexibility to be fabricated on different substrates, the prototype receiver frontend is fabricated on a low-cost, glass substrate utilising a custom-developed MMIC process backend which enables the high performance of passive components. The measured performance of the prototype makes it suitable for Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems for medical and communication applications.

Flexible One-Dimensional Metal–Insulator–Graphene Diode

“…[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] Moreover, MIG diodes are also used as building blocks to realize different circuits, such as mixers, power detectors, RF receivers etc. [17][18][19][20][21] In MIM or MIG diodes, the junction is defined by an insulating barrier layer either between two metal layers with different work functions (in the case of MIM diodes) or between one metal layer and one graphene layer (in the case of MIG diodes). The barrier layer and work-function difference dominates the rectification behavior of the MIM or MIG diodes.…”

Graphene in 2D/3D Heterostructure Diodes for High Performance Electronics and Optoelectronics

“…A sixport receiver as shown in Figure a consists of passive couplers and combiners that add the received RF signal and the reference LO signals with different phases and feed these additions to four matched, square‐law power detectors, where MIG diode‐based power detectors are used because of their good RF power detection capabilities. [ 55 ] The sixport receiver is designed for an input RF frequency range from 2.1 to 2.7 GHz utilizing lumped‐element implementation for the passive couplers and power combiner. The micrograph of a chip with a complete receiver is shown in Figure 7b occupying only an area of 4.8 mm 2 .…”

“…The unique features of the MIG diodes have been utilized in many circuit applications such as power detectors, [30,[49][50][51] mixers, [52,53] frequency multipliers, [54] and receivers. [55,56] In this section we explain the advantage of employing MIG diodes in these circuit applications.…”

Numerical Evaluation of the Effect of Geometric Tolerances on the High-Frequency Performance of Graphene Field-Effect Transistors

“…This feature is extremely interesting, for example, for the aerospace field, particularly because it is accompanied by graphene's inherent tolerance to radiation [30][31][32]. For these reasons, several examples of graphene-based RF devices have been proposed in recent years, including antennas [33,34], transmitters and receivers [35][36][37], modulators and demodulators [38][39][40][41][42][43], shields [44], power and signal amplifiers [45][46][47][48], mixers [49][50][51], and oscillators [52][53][54]. Important milestones were recently reached towards the large-scale fabrication of graphene electronic devices [55] and their integration into traditional semiconductor fabrication lines [56].…”