Optimizing the fabrication process for high performance graphene field effect transistors

Abstract As an emerging material, graphene has attracted vast interest in solid-state physics, materials science, nanoelectronics and bioscience. Graphene has zero bandgap with its valence and conduction bands are cone-shaped and meet at the K points of the Brillouin zone. Due to its high intrinsic carrier mobility, large saturation velocity, and high on state current density, graphene is also considered as a promising candidate for high-frequency devices. To improve the reliability of graphene FETs, which include shifting the Dirac point voltage toward zero, increasing the channel mobility and decreasing the source/drain contact resistance, we optimized the device fabrication process. For CVD grown graphene, the film transfer and the device fabrication processes may produce interfacial states between graphene and the substrate and make graphene p or n-type, which shift the fermi level far away from the Dirac point. We have found that after graphene film transfer, an annealing process at 400 °C under N 2 ambient will shift Dirac point toward zero gate voltage. Ti/Au, Ni, and Ti/Pd/Au source/drain structures have been studied to minimize the contact resistance. According to the measured data, Ti/Pd/Au structure gives the lowest contact resistance (∼500 ohm μm). By controlling the process of graphene growth, transfer and device fabrication, we have achieved graphene FETs with a field effective mobility of 16,000 cm 2 /V s after subtraction of contact resistance. The contact resistivity was estimated in the range of 1.1 × 10 −6  Ω cm 2 to 8.8 × 10 −6  Ω cm 2 , which is close to state of the art III–V technology. The maximum transconductance was found to be 280 mS/mm at V D  = 0.5 V, which is the highest value among CVD graphene FETs published to date.