Paraffin-enabled graphene transfer

The performance and reliability of large-area graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition are often limited by the presence of wrinkles and the transfer-process-induced polymer residue. Here, we report a transfer approach using paraffin as a support layer, whose thermal properties, low chemical reactivity and non-covalent affinity to graphene enable transfer of wrinkle-reduced and clean large-area graphene. The paraffin-transferred graphene has smooth morphology and high electrical reliability with uniform sheet resistance with ~1% deviation over a centimeter-scale area. Electronic devices fabricated on such smooth graphene exhibit electrical performance approaching that of intrinsic graphene with small Dirac points and high carrier mobility (hole mobility = 14,215 cm2 V−1 s−1; electron mobility = 7438 cm2 V−1 s−1), without the need of further annealing treatment. The paraffin-enabled transfer process could open realms for the development of high-performance ubiquitous electronics based on large-area two-dimensional materials.

Citation

Leong, W. S., Wang, H., Yeo, J., Martin-Martinez, F. J., Zubair, A., Shen, P.-C., … Kong, J. (2019). Paraffin-enabled graphene transfer. Nature Communications, 10(1). doi:10.1038/s41467-019-08813-x

Sponsors

J.K. acknowledges the support from AFOSR FATE MURI, Grant No. FA9550-15-1-0514, NSF DMR/ECCS-1509197, the Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science (NSF Award 0939514), the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (No. OSR-2015-CRG4-2634), and U.S. Army Research Office through the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (Grant No. 023674). J.-Y.H. acknowledges the support from Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT) project no. KK1801-G01 and the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (NRF-2017R1C1B2007153). J.Y., F.J.M.-M, and M.J.B also acknowledge support from AFOSR FATE MURI, Grant No. FA9550-15-1-0514 and the US Department of Defense, Office of Naval Research (N00014-16-1-233). The work is partially performed at MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) and Center for Nanoscale Systems (CNS), Harvard University. Computational simulations were performed on the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by the National Science Foundation grant number ACI-1053575, the MIT Engaging Cluster, Singapore's A* STAR Computational Resource Centre, and Singapore's National Supercomputing Centre.