Synthesis of High-quality Graphene by Inductively-coupled Plasma-enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition

Graphene has attracted significant attention due to its unique characteristics and promising nanoelectronic device applications. For practical device applications, it is essential to synthesize high-quality and large-area graphene films. Graphene has been synthesized by eloborated mechanical exfoliation of highly oriented pyrolytic graphite, chemical reduction of exfoliated grahene oxide, thermal decomposition of silicon carbide, and chemical vapor deposition (CVD) on metal substrates such as Ni, Cu, Ru etc. The CVD has advantages over some of other methods in terms of mass production on large-areas substrates and it can be easily separated from the metal substrate and transferred to other desired substrates. Especially, plasma-enhanced CVD (PECVD) can be very efficient to synthesize high-quality graphene. Little information is available on the synthesis of graphene by PECVD even though PECVD has been demonstrated to be successful in synthesizing various carbon nanostructures such as carbon nanotubes and nanosheets. In this study, we synthesized graphene on $Ni/SiO_2/Si$ and Cu plate substrates with CH4 diluted in $Ar/H_2$ (10%) by using an inductively-coupled PECVD (ICPCVD). High-quality graphene was synthesized at as low as $700^{\circ}C$ with 600 W of plasma power while graphene layer was not formed without plasma. The growth rate of graphene was so fast that graphene films fully covered on substrate surface just for few seconds $CH_4$ gas supply. The transferred graphene films on glass substrates has a transmittance at 550 nm is higher 94%, indicating 1~3 monolayers of graphene were formed. FETs based on the grapheme films transferred to $Si/SiO_2$ substrates revealed a p-type. We will further discuss the synthesis of graphene and doped graphene by ICPVCD and their characteristics.