China researches on direct writing of electronic devices on graphene

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2012-12-17 — Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, University of Science and Technology of China, has made technological breakthrough on future electronics. Chinese scientists has developed new methods on direct writing of electronic devices on graphene oxide by catalytic scanning probe lithography.

Reduction of graphene oxide at the nanoscale is an attractive approach to graphene-based electronics. Here we use a platinum-coated atomic force microscope tip to locally catalyse the reduction of insulating graphene oxide in the presence of hydrogen. Nanoribbons with widths ranging from 20 to 80"‰nm and conductivities of >104"‰S"‰m−1 are successfully generated, and a field effect transistor is produced. The method involves mild operating conditions, and uses arbitrary substrates, atmospheric pressure and low temperatures (≤115"‰Â°C).

Graphene, owing to its exceptionally high carrier mobility, has been envisioned as one of the best candidates for future electronics. The possibility of direct writing on graphene to construct electronic circuits by scanning probe lithography (SPL) is particularly exciting and has been extensively examined by different approaches with the focus of creating well-defined insulated separators on highly conductive graphene. In this context, a chemically more realistic approach is to create conducting nanoribbons on insulated graphene oxides (GO) through the reduction reaction. GO has been used as the seed for cost-effective mass production of graphene in recent years. The conductivity of a fully oxidized GO is extremely small, but it can be significantly increased by chemical reduction. Such a contrast offers the opportunity to utilize direct writing of electronic circuits on GO if an efficient local chemical reduction process can be obtained. Recently, it is reported that the direct writing with nanoscopic resolution can be achieved through local thermal reduction of GO with a heated atomic force microscope (AFM) tip17. However, the maximal contrast can only be reached at a temperature around 1000"‰Â°C, which might be too high for practical applications. It is highly desirable to find a local reduction scheme18 that works at much more mild conditions. For this purpose, a highly efficient catalysed reaction should be introduced through the use of the catalytic SPL (cSPL) technique.
 

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