Review of Graphene Technology and Its Applications for Electronic Devices

Abstract

Graphene has amazing abilities due to its unique band structure characteristics defining its enhanced electrical capabilities for a material with the highest characteristic mobility known to exist at room temperature. The high mobility of graphene occurs due to electron delocalization and weak electron-phonon interaction, making graphene an ideal material for electrical applications requiring high mobility and fast response times. In this review, we cover graphene's integration into infrared IR devices, electro-optic EO devices, and field effect transistors FETs for radio frequency RF applications. The benefits of utilizing graphene for each case are discussed, along with examples showing the current state-of-the-art solutions for these applications.Graphene has many outstanding properties due to its unique bonding and subsequently band gap characteristics, having electronic carriers act as massless DiracFermions. The material characteristics of graphene are anisotropic, having phenomenal characteristic within a single sheet and diminished material characteristics between sheet with increasing sheet number and grain boundaries. We will discuss the integration of graphene into many electronic device applications.Graphene has the highest mobility values measured in a material at room temperature, allowing integration into fast response time devices such as a high electron mobility transistor HEMT for RF applications. Graphene has shown promise in IR detectors by utilizing graphene in thermal-based detection applications.

Nanostructure Technology for EO/IR Detector Applications

“…Graphene is a two-dimensional analogue of carbon-based graphite material that has exceptional electrical characteristics, e.g., mobilities up to 15,000-200,000 cm 2 /Vs, derived from the bonding characteristics of the carbon sheets [5].…”

“…The absence of a band gap in graphene limits voltage and power gains that may be achieved through operation of a device in the saturation regime. To overcome this, several doping strategies as shown in Figure 2 have been proposed and tested, including: electrostatic doping, chemical doping, and stress or geometry restricted doping by breaking the graphene periodicity [5,11]. Since it can be doped electrostatically, graphene provides a useful solution for certain electronic applications such the channels in field effect transistors (FETs) [12].…”

“…CNTs exhibit bandgaps in the range of zero to ~2 eV, and demonstrate metallic or semiconducting behavior depending mainly on their diameter and orientation of the hexagonal graphene structure along the axis of the tube (armchair, zigzag, or chiral) as illustrated in Figure 3(a) [13]. CNTs can exhibit exceptional conductivity, and as a result have found application in nanoscale FETs that have enabled novel devices including intermolecular logic gates [5].…”

“…Uncooled microbolometers used as detectors in thermal cameras have traditionally been based on silicon as well as vanadium oxide material deposited on silicon. However, the use of novel carbon nanotube-based detector elements in IR microbolometer pixels is attractive due to the potential for high electron mobilities and high temperature sensitivity [5]. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) basically comprise hexagonal sheets of graphene, a material with enhanced electrical capabilities, rolled into cylinders that exhibit exceptional conductivity and strength [6].…”

HICOLM: High-Performance Platform of Physical Simulations by Using Low Computational Cost Methods

“…From the theoretical point of view, researchers have been using the most varied computational simulation techniques to analyze electronic and magnetic behavior of several materials. Due to this, graphene has been the subject of great interest by the scientific community due to its physical properties, such as hardness and conductivity [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. Through methods such as density functional theory (DFT), the electronic proprieties of HICOLM: High-Performance Platform of Large Systems by Using Low Computational Cost Methods graphene can be obtained with a considerable level of precision.…”