The outstanding electrical and material properties of Graphene have made it a promising material for several fields of analog applications, though its zero bandgap precludes its application in digital and logic devices. With its remarkably high electron mobility at room temperature, Graphene also has strong potential for terahertz (THz) plasmonic devices. However there still are challenges to be solved to realize Graphene’s full potential for practical applications.
In this dissertation, we investigate solutions for some of these challenges. First, to reduce the access resistances which significantly reduces the radio frequency (RF) performance of Graphene field effect transistors (GFETs), a novel device structure consisting of two additional contacts at the access region has been successfully modeled, designed, microfabicated/integrated, and characterized. The additional contacts of the proposed device are capacitively coupled to the device channel and independently biased, that induce more carriers and effectively reduce access resistance.
In addition to that, in this dissertation, bandgap has been experimentally introduced to semi-metallic Graphene, by decorating with randomly distributed gold nano-particles and zinc oxide (ZnO) nano-seeds, where their interaction breaks its sublattice symmetry and opens up bandgap. The engineered bandgap was extracted from its temperature dependent conductivity characteristics and compared with reported theoretical estimation. The proposed method of device engineering combined with material bandgap engineering, on a single device, introduces a gateway towards high speed Graphene logic devices.
Finally, THz plasmon generation and propagation in Graphene grating gate field effect transistors and Graphene plasmonic ring resonators have been investigated analytically and numerically to explore their potential use for compact, solid state tunable THz detectors.
