The materials science of graphene grown epitaxially on the hexagonal basal planes of SiC crystals is reviewed. We show that the growth of epitaxial graphene on Si-terminated SiC is much different than growth on the Cterminated SiC surface, and discuss the physical structure of these graphenes. The unique electronic structure and transport properties of each type of epitaxial graphene is described, as well as progress toward the development of epitaxial graphene devices. This materials system is rich in subtleties, and graphene grown on the two polar faces differs in important ways, but all of the salient features of ideal graphene are found in these epitaxial graphenes, and wafer-scale fabrication of multi-GHz devices already has been achieved.

Abstract:Since its inception in 2001, the science and technology of epitaxial graphene on hexagonal silicon carbide has matured into a major international effort and is poised to become the first carbon electronics platform. A historical perspective is presented and the unique electronic properties of single and multilayered epitaxial graphenes on electronics grade silicon carbide are reviewed. Early results on transport and the field effect in Si-face grown graphene monolayers provided proof-of-principle demonstrations. Besides monolayer epitaxial graphene, attention is given to C-face grown multilayer graphene, which consists of electronically decoupled graphene sheets. Production, structure, and electronic structure are reviewed. The electronic properties, interrogated using a wide variety of surface, electrical and optical probes, are discussed. An overview is given of recent developments of several device prototypes including resistance standards based on epitaxial graphene quantum Hall devices and new ultrahigh frequency analog epitaxial graphene amplifiers.

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In this letter, we present state-of-the-art performance of top-gated graphene n-FETs and p-FETs fabricated with epitaxial graphene layers grown on Si-face 6H-SiC substrates on 50-mm wafers. The current-voltage characteristics of these devices show excellent saturation with ON-state current densities (I on) of 0.59 A/mm at V ds = 1 V and 1.65 A/mm at V ds = 3 V. I on /I off ratios of 12 and 19 were measured at V ds = 1 and 0.5 V, respectively. A peak extrinsic g m as high as 600 mS/mm was measured at V ds = 3.05 V, with a gate length of 2.94 μm. The field-effect mobility versus effective electric field (E eff) was measured for the first time in epitaxial graphene FETs, where record field-effect mobilities of 6000 cm 2 /V • s for electrons and 3200 cm 2 /V • s for holes were obtained at E eff ∼ 0.27 MV/cm.

We report on an experimental demonstration of graphene-metal ohmic contacts with contact resistance below 100 Ω µm. These have been fabricated on graphene wafers, both with and without hydrogen intercalation, and measured using the transmission line method. Specific contact resistivities of 3 × 10−7 to 1.2 × 10−8 Ω cm2 have been obtained. The ultra-low contact resistance yielded short-channel (source-drain distance of 0.45 µm) HfO2/graphene field effect transistors (FETs) with a low on-resistance (Ron) of 550 Ω µm and a high current density of 1.7 A/mm at a source-drain voltage of 1 V. These values represent state-of-the-art (SOA) performance in graphene-metal contacts and graphene FETs. This ohmic contact resistance is comparable to that of SOA high-speed III–V high electron mobility transistors.