Graphene merged with insulator to create 2D electronic devices

The materials — graphene and hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) — have been merged into sheets and built into a variety of patterns at nanoscale dimensions.

The method from Rice is claimed to offer manufacturers the possibility of shrinking electronic devices into even smaller packages. While Rice’s technical capabilities limited features to a resolution of about 100nm, the only real limits are those defined by modern lithographic techniques, according to the researchers.

‘It should be possible to make fully functional devices with circuits 30nm, even 20nm, wide, all in two dimensions,’ said Rice researcher Jun Lou, a co-author of a new paper that appears in Nature Nanotechnology. That would make circuits on about the same scale as in current semiconductor fabrication, he said.

H-BN looks like graphene, with the same chicken-wire atomic array, and has been found to work well as an insulator. Earlier work at Rice showed that merging graphene and h-BN via chemical vapour deposition (CVD) created sheets with pools of the two that afforded some control of the material’s electronic properties.