Field Effect Transistors and Low Noise Amplifier MMICs of Monolayer Graphene

Abstract

The most attractive application of graphene in the RF area is low-noise amplifier (LNA) due to its amazing properties. But, design and fabrication of graphene LNA Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMICs) are still blank. In this work, 200 nm gate-length chemical vapor deposition (CVD) monolayer graphene transistors were fabricated on a sapphire substrate. The graphene transistor shows an intrinsic gain of g <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">m</sub> /g <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">ds</sub> = 1.1, and high extrinsic maximum oscillation frequency with f <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">max</sub> (48 GHz) > cutoff frequency f <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">T</sub> (43 GHz). The graphene transistors show low extrinsic minimum noise figure of 2-7 dB in the measured frequency range of 6-50 GHz. AC-band graphene LNA MMIC was designed and fabricated and shows a maximum gain of 8.34 dB at 5.5 GHz, and minimum noise figure of 4.96 dB at 5.8 GHz. This work demonstrates the application potential of graphene for future RF high-speed electronics.