Numerical Evaluation of the Effect of Geometric Tolerances on the High-Frequency Performance of Graphene Field-Effect Transistors

Abstract

The interest in graphene-based electronics is due to graphene’s great carrier mobility, atomic thickness, resistance to radiation, and tolerance to extreme temperatures. These characteristics enable the development of extremely miniaturized high-performing electronic devices for next-generation radiofrequency (RF) communication systems. The main building block of graphene-based electronics is the graphene-field effect transistor (GFET). An important issue hindering the diffusion of GFET-based circuits on a commercial level is the repeatability of the fabrication process, which affects the uncertainty of both the device geometry and the graphene quality. Concerning the GFET geometrical parameters, it is well known that the channel length is the main factor that determines the high-frequency limitations of a field-effect transistor, and is therefore the parameter that should be better controlled during the fabrication. Nevertheless, other parameters are affected by a fabrication-related tolerance; to understand to which extent an increase of the accuracy of the GFET layout patterning process steps can improve the performance uniformity, their impact on the GFET performance variability should be considered and compared to that of the channel length. In this work, we assess the impact of the fabrication-related tolerances of GFET-base amplifier geometrical parameters on the RF performance, in terms of the amplifier transit frequency and maximum oscillation frequency, by using a design-of-experiments approach.