Radio-Frequency Performance of Epitaxial Graphene Field-Effect Transistors on Sapphire Substrates.

We report dc and the first-ever measured small signal rf performance of epitaxial graphene field-effect transistors (GFETs), where the epitaxial graphene is grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) on a 2-inch c-plane sapphire substrate. Our epitaxial graphene material has a good flatness and uniformity due to the low carbon concentration during the graphene growth. With a gate length Lg = 100 nm, the maximum drain source current Ids and peak transconductance gm reach 0.92 A/mm and 0.143 S/mm, respectively, which are the highest results reported for GFETs directly grown on sapphire. The extrinsic cutoff frequency (fT) and maximum oscillation frequency (fmax) of the device are 12 GHz and 9.5 GHz, and up to 32 GHz and 21.5 GHz after de-embedding, respectively. Our work proves that epitaxial graphene on sapphire substrates is a promising candidate for rf electronics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]