CVD enabled Graphene Technology and Devices (GRAPHTED)

Graphene is a single layer of graphite just one atom thick. As a material it is completely new - not only the thinnest ever but also the strongest. It is almost completely transparent, yet as a conductor of electricity it performs as well or even better than copper. Since the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to UK researchers in this field, fundamental graphene research has attracted much investment by industry and governments around the world, and has created unprecedented excitement. There have been numerous proof-of concept demonstrations for a wide range of applications for graphene. Many applications require high quality material, however, most high quality graphene to date is made by exfoliation with scotch tape from graphite flakes. This is not a manufacturable route as graphene produced this way is prohibitively expensive, equivalent to £10bn per 12" wafer. For high quality graphene to become commercially viable, its price needs to be reduced to £30-100 per wafer, a factor of 100 million. Hence graphene production and process technology is the key bottleneck to be overcome in order to unlock its huge application potential. Overcoming this bottleneck lies at the heart of this proposal.

Our proposal aims to develop the potential of graphene into a robust and disruptive technology. We will use a growth method called chemical vapour deposition (CVD) as the key enabler, and address the key questions of industrial materials development. CVD was the growth method that opened up diamond, carbon nanotubes and GaN to industrial scale production. Here it will be developed for graphene as CVD has the potential to give graphene over large areas at low cost and at a quality that equals that of the best exfoliated flakes. CVD is also a quite versatile process that enables novel strategies to integrate graphene with other materials into device architectures. In collaboration with leading industrial partners Aixtron UK, Philips, Intel, Thales and Selex Galileo, we will develop novel integration routes for a diverse set of near-term as well as future applications, for which graphene can outperform current materials and allows the use of previously impossible device form factors and functionality.

We will integrate graphene for instance as a transparent conductor into organic light emitting diodes that offer new, efficient and environmentally friendly solutions for general lighting, including a flexible form factor that could revolutionize traditional lighting designs. We will also integrate graphene into liquid crystal devices that offer ultra high resolution and novel optical storage systems. Unlike currently used materials, graphene is also transparent in the infrared range, which is of great interest for many sensing applications in avionics, military imaging and fire safety which we will explore. Furthermore, we propose to develop a carbon based interconnect technology to overcome the limitations Cu poses for next generation microelectronics. This is a key milestone in the semiconductor industry roadmap. As a potential disruptive future technology, we propose to integrate graphene into so called lab-on-a-chip devices tailored to rapid single-molecule biosensing. These are predicted to revolutionize clinical analysis in particular regarding DNA and protein structure determination.

Our project GRAPHTED addresses key questions pertinent to industrial materials development for graphene, in particular low-cost, scalable, reproducible production and integration of high quality graphene. It will develop chemical vapour deposition (CVD) as the main low cost production technique, to reduce the cost from £10bn per wafer (the effective price of exfoliated graphene) down to £30-100 per wafer. This dramatic 100 million-fold cost reduction will allow CVD graphene to replace exfoliated graphene flakes as the standard research material, and to develop an industrial basis for graphene's exploitation, following a similar pathway that allowed CVD to replace other production routes of carbon nanotubes or diamond. This is highly relevant to the academic research relating to graphene and crucial to increase the industrial relevance of graphene, and to enable commercial dividends to be paid on the substantial investment that the UK has already made in graphene research, and which it will make in the future.

The project also contains the full supply chain of beneficiaries, from equipment manufacturers (Aixtron UK) to electronics and photonics companies (Philips, Intel, Thales, Selex Galileo). An immediate route to impact is through Aixtron UK itself, and the many more units of process equipment and upgrades it can sell to research users and industry due to the process technology developed by this project. It is also relevant that Aixtron is also a supplier of GaN and OLED deposition equipment, whose customers (e.g. Philips, Osram) would also be users of the transparent electrode application at the centre of the project. Hence our project has a real potential to create jobs at Aixtron in the UK. We infer that the technology IP created will yield long-term economic benefits to the UK, which will accrue as capability grows.

The long term societal impact of our project can be significant in particular through the diverse set of applications we study that promise for instance environmentally friendly solutions for general lighting, new form factors in life style electronics, improved military imaging and fire safety, and mass sensing applications in healthcare, security and environmental protection.