Scalable templated growth of graphene nanoribbons on SiC

Mike Sprinkle (1) , Ming Ruan (1) , Yike Hu (1) , John H. Hankinson (1) , Miguel Rubio-Roy (1) , Baiqian Zhang (1) , Xiaosong Wu (1) , Claire Berger (2) , Walt. A. de Heer (1)

1 School of Physics
2 NEEL - QuantECA - Circuits électroniques quantiques Alpes

Excellent electronic properties notwithstanding, the use of graphene in field- effect transistors is not practical at room temperature without modification of its intrinsically semi-metallic nature to introduce a band gap. Quantum confinement effects can create a band gap in graphene nanoribbons, but existing nanoribbon fabrication methods are slow and often produce disordered edges that compromise electronic properties. Here we demonstrate the self- organized growth of graphene nanoribbons on a templated silicon carbide substrate prepared using scalable photolithography and microelectronics processing. Direct nanoribbon growth avoids damaging post-processing. Raman spectroscopy, high-resolution transmission electron microscopy, and electrostatic force microscopy confirm that nanoribbons as narrow as 40 nm can be grown at specifed positions on the substrate. Our prototype graphene devices exhibit quantum confinement at low temperature (4 K), and an on-off ratio of 10 and carrier mobilities up to 2,700 cm2/(V . s) at room temperature. We demonstrate the scalability of this approach by fabricating 10,000 top-gated graphene tran-sistors on a 0.24 cm2 SiC chip, which is the largest density of graphene devices reported to date.

Domaines: Systèmes mésoscopiques et effet Hall quantique [cond-mat.mes-hall]

Mike Sprinkle, Ming Ruan, Yike Hu, John H. Hankinson, Miguel Rubio-Roy, et al.. Scalable templated growth of graphene nanoribbons on SiC. Nature Nanotechnology, 2010, 5, pp.727. ⟨10.1038/NNANO.2010.192⟩. ⟨hal-01002912⟩