Scaling of graphene field-effect transistors supported on hexagonal boron nitride: radio-frequency stability as a limiting factor

Abstract

The quality of graphene in nanodevices has increased hugely thanks to the use of hexagonal boron nitride as a supporting layer. This paper studies to which extent hBN together with channel length scaling can be exploited in graphene field effect transistors (GFETs) to get a competitive radio frequency (RF) performance. Carrier mobility and saturation velocity were obtained from an ensemble Monte Carlo simulator that accounted for the relevant scattering mechanisms (intrinsic phonons, scattering with impurities and defects, etc.). This information is fed into a self consistent simulator, which solves the drift diffusion equation coupled with the two dimensional Poisson's equation to take full account of short channel effects. Simulated GFET characteristics were benchmarked against experimental data from our fabricated devices. Our simulations show that scalability is supposed to bring to RF performance an improvement that is, however, highly limited by instability. Despite the possibility of a lower performance, a careful choice of the bias point can avoid instability. Nevertheless, maximum oscillation frequencies are still achievable in the THz region for channel lengths of a few hundreds of nanometers.

arXiv comment29 pages, 7 figures, 1 table, Supplementary Information (10 pages) Funded by: 1 Micronova Nanofabrication Centre 2 European Union's Horizon 2020 (696656) 3 MINECO (TEC2013-42622-R, TEC2015-67462-C2-1-R, TEC2016-80839-P, MINECO/FEDER, FJCI-2014-19643) 4 MECD (CAS16/00043) 5 Generalitat de Catalunya (2014 SGR 384)

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Compact modeling technology for the simulation of integrated circuits based on graphene field-effect transistors
• Exploiting ambipolarity in graphene field-effect transistors for novel designs on high-frequency analog electronics
• Radio frequency performance projection and stability trade-off of h-BN encapsulated graphene field-effect transistors
• Does carrier velocity saturation help to enhance fmax in graphene field-effect transistors?
• Graphene on Silicon Hybrid Field-Effect Transistors
• Multi-scale analysis of radio-frequency performance of 2D-material based field-effect transistors