Scientific Reports (May 2017)

High-Gain Graphene Transistors with a Thin AlOx Top-Gate Oxide

  • Erica Guerriero,
  • Paolo Pedrinazzi,
  • Aida Mansouri,
  • Omid Habibpour,
  • Michael Winters,
  • Niklas Rorsman,
  • Ashkan Behnam,
  • Enrique A. Carrion,
  • Amaia Pesquera,
  • Alba Centeno,
  • Amaia Zurutuza,
  • Eric Pop,
  • Herbert Zirath,
  • Roman Sordan

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-02541-2
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7, no. 1
pp. 1 – 7

Abstract

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Abstract The high-frequency performance of transistors is usually assessed by speed and gain figures of merit, such as the maximum oscillation frequency f max, cutoff frequency f T, ratio f max/f T, forward transmission coefficient S 21, and open-circuit voltage gain A v. All these figures of merit must be as large as possible for transistors to be useful in practical electronics applications. Here we demonstrate high-performance graphene field-effect transistors (GFETs) with a thin AlOx gate dielectric which outperform previous state-of-the-art GFETs: we obtained f max/f T > 3, A v > 30 dB, and S 21 = 12.5 dB (at 10 MHz and depending on the transistor geometry) from S-parameter measurements. A dc characterization of GFETs in ambient conditions reveals good current saturation and relatively large transconductance ~600 S/m. The realized GFETs offer the prospect of using graphene in a much wider range of electronic applications which require substantial gain.