Graphene is a two-dimensional sp2 hybridized carbon lattice that is also the fundamental building block of graphite. Graphene has attracted significant interest recently due to its distinctive electrical, optical and mechanical properties. These properties have spurred research directed at modifying graphene for use in a variety of electronic, optoelectronic, and sensor technologies. However, before graphene can be used in products, it is necessary to find methods to tune, modify, grow and integrate graphene features while substantially boosting device performance and maintaining current processing compatibility and ease of integration with existing manufacturing infrastructure. This dissertation focuses on developing techniques for controllably doping the graphene layer through scalable, industry friendly and simple chemical doping; using self-assembled monolayer compounds, photo-acid and photo-base generators, polymers and metal-organic species. We have, in fact, demonstrated simple p-n junctions fabricated in this manner. Characteristic I-V curves indicate the superposition of two separate Dirac points from the p and n regions, confirming an energy separation of neutrality points within the complementary regions; Raman studies of these methods have shown that these processes result in extremely low defect levels in the graphene. Our simple methods for producing patterned doping profiles in graphene films and devices open up a variety of new possibilities for forming complex doping profiles in a simple manner in graphene. This work can enable rapid testing, such as controlled work function tuning, complex doping profiles and simple post-fabrication tuning, of concepts for graphene that may be useful in both interconnect and transparent conductor applications. In addition to graphene doping, we also investigated approaches to the synthesis of few-layer graphene flakes, since current techniques still produce inferior materials. Exfoliation of Graphene Sheets by an Electron Donor Surfactant was demonstrated to generate few-layers graphene flakes that rival the electrical quality of reduce graphene-oxide (rGO) flakes. Last but not least, Diels-Alder adducts on silica were explored as a controllable carbon precursor for pristine graphene; these allow for a rational direct-growth-of-graphene-on-surface reaction mediated by copper catalyst, without the use of flammable precursors, such as methane, that are used in current methods of chemical vapor deposition synthesis of graphene.

Necessity is the mother of all inventions. With Si hitting the speed bottleneck, newer materials to replace Si are being sought out. The ex-foliation based experiments on graphene by Geim and Novoselov at this point was perfect as many of its physical properties were fascinating from an electronics standpoint and hence it was very soon projected as a Si replacement for logic applications. In addition, graphene is also an attractive alternative to applications such as radio frequency devices, ultra-sensitive mass/chemical sensing, high-speed optoelectronics and transparent conductors for photo-voltaic applications. While the widespread success and utility of Si can be attributed to easy availability of source material and the ability to synthesize large areas of ultra high quality material, chemical vapor deposition (CVD) is the only available method to controllably produce large area monolayer graphene. CVD graphene is however polycrystalline and therefore defective. Hence, in order to promote graphene towards large-scale commercialization, it is necessary to be able to grow spatially homogeneous graphene with tailored defect densities. Transfer of atomic layers of graphene from the substrate on which it is grown, a Cu foil typically, on to an insulating substrate for electrical measurements is typically a major defect inducing step. Hence, a direct transfer-free fabrication of suspended device using graphene grown on thin films of electro-deposited Cu was attempted and successfully reported for the first time. Though it was shown that the fabrication process itself did not introduce any additional defects, the maximum obtained mobility on such fabricated structures was 5200 cm2/V·s. This value is lower than reported values in literature and thus improvements for electronic applications warranted further optimization. However, limitations on ability of electro-deposited Cu films (melting point of 1083 ◦C) to withstand high temperatures, 1000 ◦C, impeded further optimizations. Hence, growth on Cu foils was taken up. On Cu foil, we were able to identify the roles of the growth kinetics and system thermodynamics on the final quality of graphene. Specifically, by carefully altering the conditions during appropriate growth phases, we were able to obtain graphene films of tunable defect densities with motilities ranging from 200 - 20000 cm2/V·s. Using a host of characterization Techniques like electrical transport, Raman spectroscopic measurements, TEM imaging and water permeation studies, we find that the defect densities in graphene are largely concentrated at the boundaries, while the bulk of the graphene grain remains pristine. Further investigations revealed a thermodynamic correlation between the growth conditions and quality of the grain boundary in terms of defect density and structure. In addition to the influence of defects in graphene on charge mobility as seen before, their impact on the device contact resistance and charge transport hysteresis in graphene field effect transistors were also investigated. With a careful control on the film defect density, we were able to demonstrate devices with low contact resistance (1000 Ωµm ) and tunable hysteresis behavior. Finally, alternate substrates for graphene and its impact on the carrier densities were explored. Non-polar substrate SiO2 and polar substrates such AlN and AlGaN were chosen. On AlN, we obtained higher carrier mobility due to reduced phonon-electron scattering and a higher ’P’ doping behavior due to piezo-electric effects. Hence, to leverage the previous observation, novel FET device architecture with a HEMT based substrate using AlGaN was demonstrated.

No description available.