High Performance Metal-Insulator-Graphene Diodes for Radio Frequency Power Detection Application

TL;DR

This paper presents scalable graphene-based metal-insulator-graphene diodes with superior RF power detection capabilities, demonstrating high current density, nonlinearity, and responsivity across a broad frequency range.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable fabrication method for MIG diodes using CVD-grown graphene and TiO2, achieving high performance metrics surpassing existing diodes.

Findings

High on-current density of 28 A/cm^2

Maximum nonlinearity of 15

Responsivity of 2.8 V/W at 2.4 GHz

Abstract

Vertical metal-insulator-graphene (MIG) diodes for radio frequency (RF) power detection are realized using a scalable approach based on graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition and TiO2 as barrier material. The temperature dependent current flow through the diode can be described by thermionic emission theory taking into account a bias induced barrier lowering at the graphene TiO2 interface. The diodes show excellent figures of merit for static operation, including high on-current density of up to 28 A/cm^2, high asymmetry of up to 520, strong maximum nonlinearity of up to 15, and large maximum responsivity of up to 26 V^{-1}, outperforming state-of-the-art metal-insulator-metal and MIG diodes. RF power detection based on MIG diodes is demonstrated, showing a responsivity of 2.8 V/W at 2.4 GHz and 1.1 V/W at 49.4 GHz.