Field Effect Transistors and Low Noise Amplifier MMICs of Monolayer Graphene
Cui Yu, Zezhao He, Xubo Song, Xuedong Gao, Qingbin Liu, Yanhui Zhang, Guanghui Yu, Tingting Han, Chen Liu, Zhihong Feng, Shujun Cai
Abstract
The most attractive application of graphene in the RF area is low-noise amplifier (LNA) due to its amazing properties. But, design and fabrication of graphene LNA Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMICs) are still blank. In this work, 200 nm gate-length chemical vapor deposition (CVD) monolayer graphene transistors were fabricated on a sapphire substrate. The graphene transistor shows an intrinsic gain of g <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">m</sub> /g <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">ds</sub> = 1.1, and high extrinsic maximum oscillation frequency with f <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">max</sub> (48 GHz) > cutoff frequency f <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">T</sub> (43 GHz). The graphene transistors show low extrinsic minimum noise figure of 2-7 dB in the measured frequency range of 6-50 GHz. AC-band graphene LNA MMIC was designed and fabricated and shows a maximum gain of 8.34 dB at 5.5 GHz, and minimum noise figure of 4.96 dB at 5.8 GHz. This work demonstrates the application potential of graphene for future RF high-speed electronics.