A Large Scale Fabrication of Graphene Based Nano-electromechanical Contact Switches With Ultra-low Pull-in Voltage

TL;DR

This paper presents a graphene-based nano-electromechanical contact switch with ultra-low pull-in voltage and enhanced contact lifetime, addressing key limitations of previous NEM switches for energy-efficient CMOS applications.

Contribution

Introduction of a graphene-on-gold electrode design enabling ultra-low pull-in voltage and high durability in NEM contact switches.

Findings

Ultra-low pull-in voltage of 0.5 V

Contact lifetime exceeds 1.5 million cycles

High on/off ratio of 10^8

Abstract

Nano-electromechanical (NEM) contact switches have been extensively studied to suppress the limitations of conventional complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) transistors. The attributes of NEM contact switches includes reduced power consumption, reduced off-state leakage current, increased on-state current and sub-thermal switching. However, unacceptably high pull-in voltage and low contact lifetime posed a significant challenge for the use of NEM contact switches in energy efficient CMOS applications. Here, we demonstrate a graphene-based electro-statically actuated NEM contact switches with ultra-low pull-in voltage and significant improvement in the contact lifetime. This was achieved by using the graphene on gold electrode as a contact material. The graphene NEM contact switches with graphene as a contact material exhibits an ultra-low pull-in voltage of 0.5 V and high contact lifetime of more than 1.5x10^6 cycles. The switches also showed an excellent switching performance with high on/off ratio of 10^8, an extremely low off-state current of 100 fA, and small hysteresis window of 0.1 V.