Graphene is now strongly emerging from the research phase towards industrial applications also in the microelectronics field, including photonics, sensing and electronics. The largest bottleneck in this process has been the scalability and reliability of the graphene fabrication and integration with the microelectronics process flows, in which respect the recent years have provided significant progress.
Most of the applications pioneering the industrialization are related to sensing, driven by the clear benefits of the high electrical responsivity of graphene and the relatively relaxed demands on the graphene quality, especially in terms of charge carrier mobility, with µ < 3000 cm2/Vs already being adequate for most sensing applications. Here the biggest remaining challenges relate to the functionalization and readout strategies, and into the reliability and reproducibility of both the functionalization and graphene properties.
CMOS integration of the graphene sensors provide keys to address all these challenges, and is also the requirement for truly quantitative on-chip bioanalysis by providing the multiplexing for bioassays. In biosensing, the high sensitivity of the graphene transducers is combined with bioreceptors to provide a response specific to the desired bioanalytes, and the quantitativity generally requires both statistics and carefully selected set of receptors for internal calibration and referencing.
I will address our recent progress towards the fabrication of monolithically integrated graphene biosensor assays, from the graphene device fabrication on CMOS to array performance in liquid phase analysis, and give an overview of the future challenges.
Dr. Sanna Arpiainen a principal scientist and team leader at VTT Ltd and coordinates the graphene and 2D materials research and commercial offering at VTT, with special focus on CVD graphene based applications in biosensing, photonics and electronics. She made her PhD on graphene and photonic crystal integration on microelectronics processes for Aalto University in 2015. Her background is in optical MEMS, photonics integration, nanotechnology and materials research. She is the PI of several national and international research projects on graphene sensors, photonics and integration, and acted as the chair of the Graphene Week 2019 in Helsinki, Finland.
VVTT Technical Research Centre of Finland is one of the leading research and technology organisations in Europe. We use our scientific and technological excellence to provide innovation services and develop smart technologies for our domestic and international customers and partners. We have strong offering on sensors, high frequency electronics, integrated silicon photonics and superconductivity based quantum technologies. Our contract manufacturing services include graphene processing and CMOS integration on 100-200 mm wafer platforms, IC design for graphene sensors and printed graphene electronics and fabrics.
