Harnessing graphene’s properties on a silicon platform could deliver a broad range of novel miniaturized and in-situ reconfigurable functionalities. We will review the learnings from the development of our epitaxial graphene on silicon carbide on silicon technology and some of its most promising applications. This platform allows to obtain any complex graphene-coated silicon carbide 3D nanostructures in a site-selective fashion at the wafer-scale and with sufficient adhesion for integration.
Key capabilities for nano-optics and metasurfaces in the MIR are specifically unlocked by the graphene/silicon carbide combination. We have demonstrated that the sheet resistance of epitaxial graphene on 3C-SiC on silicon is comparable to that of epitaxial graphene on SiC wafers, despite substantially smaller grains. We also indicate that the control of the graphene interfaces, particularly when integrated, can be a more important factor than achieving large grain sizes. Interestingly, we have also recently indicated that small-scale defects such as grain boundaries have little influence on the sheet resistance in the radio-frequency spectrum. In addition, we show that well-engineered defects in graphene are preferable to defect-free graphene for most electrochemical applications, including biosensing. Promising examples of application of this technology in the More-than Moore domain include integrated energy storage, MIR sensing and detection, and sensors for electro-encephalography for brain computer interfaces.
Professor Francesca Iacopi has more than 20 years’ industrial and academic research expertise in semiconductor technologies, with 160 peer-reviewed publications and 10 granted U.S. patents, spanning interconnects, CMOS devices and packaging. Her research focuses on the translation of basic scientific advances in nanomaterials and novel device concepts into implementable integrated technologies. She is known for her seminal work on the integration of porous dielectrics in on-chip interconnects and for the invention of the alloy-mediated epitaxial graphene platform on SiC/Si pseudo-substrates.
She was recipient of an MRS Gold Graduate Student Award (2003), an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (2012), and a Global Innovation Award in Washington D.C. (2014) and was listed among the most innovative engineers by Engineers Australia (2018). Francesca is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers Australia, an IEEE EDS Distinguished Lecturer and serves regularly in technical and strategic committees for IEEE and MRS. She is an Elected Member to the IEEE EDS Board of Governors (2021) and serves in the Editorial Advisory Boards of ACS Applied Nanomaterials, the Journal of Electronic Materials (Springer), and the IEEE The Institute magazine. She leads the Integrated Nano systems Lab in the Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Technology Sydney. She is an Associate Investigator of the Centre of Excellence in Low-Energy Electronics Technologies (FLEET) and a Chief Investigator of the CoE in Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS), funded by the Australian Research Council.