Abstract
The interest in graphene-based electronics is due to graphene’s great carrier mobility, atomic thickness, resistance to radiation, and tolerance to extreme temperatures. These characteristics enable the development of extremely miniaturized high-performing electronic devices for next-generation radiofrequency (RF) communication systems. The main building block of graphene-based electronics is the graphene-field effect transistor (GFET). An important issue hindering the diffusion of GFET-based circuits on a commercial level is the repeatability of the fabrication process, which affects the uncertainty of both the device geometry and the graphene quality. Concerning the GFET geometrical parameters, it is well known that the channel length is the main factor that determines the high-frequency limitations of a field-effect transistor, and is therefore the parameter that should be better controlled during the fabrication. Nevertheless, other parameters are affected by a fabrication-related tolerance; to understand to which extent an increase of the accuracy of the GFET layout patterning process steps can improve the performance uniformity, their impact on the GFET performance variability should be considered and compared to that of the channel length. In this work, we assess the impact of the fabrication-related tolerances of GFET-base amplifier geometrical parameters on the RF performance, in terms of the amplifier transit frequency and maximum oscillation frequency, by using a design-of-experiments approach.
Highlights
Despite the advances in CMOS-based RF devices, unsolved issues related to losses and noise have determined the rise of III-V compound semiconductors technology, which made great achievements in high-frequency applications thanks to high electron mobility [1,2,3,4]
In order to validate the simulation results, the f T and f MAX obtained by the circuit simulator for the nominal design of the graphene-field effect transistor (GFET) were compared with the measured values reported in [45]
By looking concluded the transition frequency f T is by farinteraction more sensitive to the channel length at
Summary
The research in high-frequency electronics has been historically driven by the development of advanced radiofrequency (RF) wireless telecommunication systems. Nanomaterials 2021, 11, 3121 tage of the GFET current ambipolarity, which enables a strong reduction in the transistor count and favours additional miniaturization capabilities [29] This feature is extremely interesting, for example, for the aerospace field, because it is accompanied by graphene’s inherent tolerance to radiation [30,31,32]. The second category includes the parameters expressing the graphene quality (i.e., mobility, doping caused by traps and impurities, defects), which are determined by the capability of the growth or transfer process to not degrade the material electrical properties. These two categories of factors are independent and can be treated separately. Following the study presented in [62], where we discussed the impact of tolerances on the amplifier’s transconductance, gm , and output conductance, gds , the influence of the same variations is reported here on the high-frequency performance described in terms of f T and f MAX
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