Field Effect Transistors and Low Noise Amplifier MMICs of Monolayer Graphene

The most attractive application of graphene in the RF area is low-noise amplifier (LNA) due to its amazing properties. But, design and fabrication of graphene LNA Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMICs) are still blank. In this work, 200 nm gate-length chemical vapor deposition (CVD) monolayer graphene transistors were fabricated on a sapphire substrate. The graphene transistor shows an intrinsic gain of ${g} _{\text{m}}/{g} _{\text{ds}}= {1.1}$ , and high extrinsic maximum oscillation frequency with ${f} _{\text{max}}$ (48 GHz) > cutoff frequency ${f} _{\text{T}}$ (43 GHz). The graphene transistors show low extrinsic minimum noise figure of 2–7 dB in the measured frequency range of 6–50 GHz. A C-band graphene LNA MMIC was designed and fabricated and shows a maximum gain of 8.34 dB at 5.5 GHz, and minimum noise figure of 4.96 dB at 5.8 GHz. This work demonstrates the application potential of graphene for future RF high-speed electronics.