Since the first isolation of graphene over a decade ago, research into graphene has exponentially increased due to its excellent electrical, optical, mechanical and chemical properties. Graphene has been shown to enhance the performance of various electronic devices. In addition, graphene can be simply produced through chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Although the synthesis of graphene has been widely researched, especially for CVD growth method, the lack of understanding on various synthetic parameters still limits the fabrication of large-area and defect-free graphene films. This report critically reviews various parameters affecting the quality of CVD-grown graphene to understand the relationship between these parameters and the choice of metal substrates and to provide a point of reference for future studies of large-area, CVD-grown graphene.

Graphene is a promising electrode material not only due to its intrinsic properties like good electrical conductivity, high mechanical strength and high chemical stability, but also because of its high theoretical surface area of 2630 m 2 g −1 . In this report, the effect of CVD parameters to the growth of high quality graphene on metal substrates by using plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) was extensively studied. Interestingly, synthesizing high quality graphene by PECVD technique is not only depending on the CVD parameters, but also depending on the catalysts and its plasma sources. It was found that Ni and Cu are the most favored metal catalysts for PECVD graphene growth. With high solubility of carbon (> 0.1 at. %), Ni effectively promote the growth of multilayer graphene by PECVD. However, large-area synthesis has made relatively inexpensive Cu as one of the most attractive substrates for monolayer graphene growth. Further details on the potential use of different transition metal catalysts in synthesizing graphene and consequently the specific usage of graphene based devices are discussed in this report.

Abstract

An in-depth systematic study on the importance of fluid dynamics at the gas–solid interface to graphene growth in APCVD.

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