Current Status of Graphene Transistors

TL;DR

This review discusses the current state of graphene transistors, highlighting manufacturing methods, challenges due to lack of band gap, and potential applications in RF and memory devices.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of graphene transistor technology, including band gap engineering techniques and emerging switching mechanisms.

Findings

Graphene transistors face challenges due to absence of an energy band gap.

Band gap engineering methods like GNRs and substrate effects are explored.

Graphene transistors show promise for RF applications and future memory devices.

Abstract

This paper reviews the current status of graphene transistors as potential supplement to silicon CMOS technology. A short overview of graphene manufacturing and metrology methods is followed by an introduction of macroscopic graphene field effect transistors (FETs). The absence of an energy band gap is shown to result in severe shortcomings for logic applications. Possibilities to engineer a band gap in graphene FETs including quantum confinement in graphene Nanoribbons (GNRs) and electrically or substrate induced asymmetry in double and multi layer graphene are discussed. Graphene FETs are shown to be of interest for analog radio frequency applications. Finally, novel switching mechanisms in graphene transistors are briefly introduced that could lead to future memory devices.