Cascading wafer-scale integrated graphene complementary inverters under ambient conditions

Abstract

The fundamental building blocks of digital electronics are logic gates which must be capable of cascading such that more complex logic functions can be realized. Here we demonstrate integrated graphene complementary inverters which operate with the same input and output voltage logic levels, thus allowing cascading. We obtain signal matching under ambient conditions with inverters fabricated from wafer-scale graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Monolayer graphene was incorporated in self-aligned field-effect transistors in which the top gate overlaps with the source and drain contacts. This results in full-channel gating and leads to the highest low-frequency voltage gain reported so far in top-gated CVD graphene devices operating in air ambient, A(v) ∼ -5. Such gain enabled logic inverters with the same voltage swing of 0.56 V at their input and output. Graphene inverters could find their way in realistic applications where high-speed operation is desired but power dissipation is not a concern, similar to emitter-coupled logic.