2012, Vol.13, No.1

Carbon Letters 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.35 KCI-WoS Impact Factor : 4.82

pISSN : 1976-4251 / eISSN : 2233-4998
https://journal.kci.go.kr/carbon

The near explosion of attention given to graphene has attracted many to its research field. As new studies and findings about graphene synthesis, properties, electronic quality control, and possible applications simultaneous burgeon in the scientific community, it is quite hard to grasp the breadth of graphene history. At this stage, graphene’s many fascinating qualities have been amply reported and its potential for various electronic applications are increasing, pulling in ever more newcomers to the field of graphene. Thus it has become important as a community to have an equal understanding of how this material was discovered, why it is stirring up the scientific community and what sort of progress has been made and for what purposes. Since the first discovery,the hype has expediently led to near accomplishment of industrial-sized production of graphene. This review covers the progress and development of synthesis and transfer techniques with an emphasis on the most recent technique of chemical vapor deposition, and explores the potential applications of graphene that are made possible with the improved synthesis and transfer.

Currently, graphene is a topic of very active research in fields from science to potential applications. For various radio-frequency (RF) circuit applications including low-noise amplifiers,the unique ambipolar nature of graphene field-effect transistors can be utilized for highperformance frequency multipliers, mixers and high-speed radiometers. Potential integration of graphene on Silicon substrates with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor compatibility would also benefit future RF systems. The future success of the RF circuit applications depends on vertical and lateral scaling of graphene metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors to minimize parasitics and improve gate modulation efficiency in the channel. In this paper, we highlight recent progress in graphene materials, devices, and circuits for RF applications. For passive RF applications, we show its transparent electromagnetic shielding in Ku-band and transparent antenna, where its success depends on quality of materials. We also attempt to discuss future applications and challenges of graphene.

Graphene is an attractive material for device applications, but device characteristics are very unstable because the graphene is very sensitive to environmental factors such as charges nearby the graphene, metal contacts, defects, contaminants and other adsorbates. Since the interactions between graphene and environmental factors affect the electrical characteristics of graphene devices, the interpretation of electrical characteristics as simple as current-voltage curves is non-trivial, despite the common practice of using well known electrical characterization methods that have been used in silicon MOSFET. This paper addresses major obstacles in the electrical characterization of graphene devices and offers countermeasures to improve the accuracy of electrical characterization methods.