Very large monolayer graphene ribbons grown on SiC

Graphene has emerged recently as a new material with outstanding electronic properties. This includes mass-less Dirac fermions, ballistic transport properties at room temperature and good compatibility with the silicon planar technology. Graphene-based devices are then promising candidates to complement silicon in the future generations of high frequency microelectronic devices. Different techniques have been developed over the past 4 years to fabricate mono or bi-layers of graphene. They range from exfoliated graphite, either mechanically, 1 or in a liquid-phase solution, 2 to chemical vapor deposition on a metal surface, 3,4 and more recently, to substrate-free synthesis when passing ethanol into an argon plasma. 5 The method investigated in this work consists in a controlled sublimation of few atomic layers of Si from a mono crystalline SiC substrate. 6 Such epitaxial growth (EG) of graphene seems to be the most suitable option for industrial applications, 7 but for easy control, it necessitates large and homogeneous sheets of monolayer or few layers of graphene (FLG) covering either a full- wafer surface or a specific area of an AlN pre-patterned SiC substrate. 8