Compact Physical Modeling of Graphene Field Effect Transistors

Graphene is a two-dimensional (2D) material that has attracted great interest for electronic devices since the demonstration of field effect carrier modulation in 2004 [1] . Its high mobility and high saturation velocity make graphene a promising material for next generation of high-frequency devices [2] , and its 2D geometry also makes it highly compatible with existing fabrication technology in the semiconductor industry. Furthermore, the possibility of large-scale synthesis of graphene by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and epitaxial growth [3] [4] [5] makes graphene integrated circuits a feasible reality in the near future. Hence, it is desirable to develop a compact physical model that can enable the use of computer-aided-design software to simulate future complex circuits. In this work, we develop a compact model for the current-voltage characteristics of graphene field effect transistors (GFETs), which is based on an extension of the “virtual-source” model previously proposed for Si MOSFETs [6] [7] and is valid for both saturation and non-saturation regions of device operation (Figure 1). This virtual source model provides a simple and intuitive understanding of carrier transport in GFETs, allowing extraction of the virtual source injection velocity vVS, a physical parameter with great technological significance for short-channel graphene transistors. With only a small set of fitting parameters, the model shows excellent agreement with experimental data (Figure 2). It is also shown that the extracted virtual source carrier injection velocity for graphene devices is much higher than in Si MOSFETs and state-of-the-art III-V HFETs with similar gate length, supporting the great potential of GFETs for high frequency applications. Future work includes extending the model for both small signal and large signal modeling of GFETs RF performance and implementation in Verilog to enable modeling of graphene circuits.

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