About the speaker
Professor Francesca Iacopi is an IEEE Fellow with over 20 years' industrial and academic expertise in semiconductor technologies spanning interconnects, devices and packaging. Her focus is the translation of basic scientific advances in nanomaterials and novel device concepts into implementable integrated technologies. She is known for her seminal work on the integration of porous dielectrics in on-chip interconnects, and for the invention of the alloy -mediated epitaxial graphene platform on SiC on silicon wafers. She was recipient of an MRS Gold Graduate Student Award (2003), an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (2012), a Global Innovation Award in Washington DC (2014) and was listed among the most innovative engineers by Engineers Australia (2018). Francesca serves regularly in technical and strategic committees for IEEE and the Materials Research Society. She is an Elected Member to the IEEE EDS Board of Governors (2021, 2024) and serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for ACS Applied Nanomaterials, and the IEEE The Institute magazine. She is also the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Trans. on Materials for Electron Devices. In 2024, she left her tenured professorship at the University of Technology Sydney to join imec USA as the inaugural Director of the Imec Indiana R&D Center based at Purdue University, IN, USA.
Abstract
The continuous reduction trend of the electronic devices' sizes over the past several decades has supported the growing demands for improved performance as well as for increasing multifunctionality within a smaller form -factor - as anticipated by Gordon Moore in 1965 [1]. 2D materials -nowadays a rather large class of only a few atoms -thin materials, propelled by the seminal paper on graphene by Geim and Novoselov in 2004 [2]- could further extend such trajectory. They are naturally the thinnest materials, intrinsically multifunctional, and are available as semiconductors, semimetals and insulators. 2D materials have thus ushered us quickly towards an "era of surfaces", an unchartered territory for the semiconductor industry. Our conventional knowledge around surfaces, doping, defects and bandgap of a thin film are all challenged, and making a technological choice only based on the pristine properties of a standalone 2D material would be unwise [3].
After a short preamble about the use of semiconductor 2D materials such as transition metal dichalcogenides for advanced FETs, we will explore some exciting applications of graphene as a multifunctional, dynamically tunable semimetal.
In particular, the harnessing of graphene's properties on silicon wafers, despite inherent challenges, could deliver a broad range of miniaturized and reconfigurable functionalities to complement CMOS technologies in a system with the smallest form-factor.
Over the last decade, my group pioneered an epitaxial graphene on silicon carbide on silicon technology able to fill this gap, in addition, unlocking unique functionalities for MEMS/NEMS, nano-optics and metasurfaces thanks to the specific combination of graphene with silicon carbide [4, 5, 6]. This platform allows to realize any complex graphene nanopattern in a site – selective fashion, at the wafer -scale and with sufficient adhesion for subsequent integration [4, 7]. We will review the fundamental hallmarks of this technology and some of its most promising applications in areas as diverse as integrated energy storage [8], reconfigurable metasurfaces for MIR sensing and detection [9], and electrodes for electro-encephalography for brain-computer interfaces [10, 11].
[1] G.Moore, Electronics, Volume 38, Number 8, April 19, 1965.
[2] K. S. Novoselov et al., Science 306,666-66, 2004.
[3] F.Iacopi, IEEE Trans. on Materials for Electron Devices 1, iii-iv, 2024
[4] B.Cunning et al, Nanotechnology 25 (32), 325301, 2014
[5] E.Romero et al., Physical Review Applied 13 (4), 044007, 2020
[6] P.Rufangura e al, Journal of Physics: Materials 3 (3), 032005, 2020
[7] D.Katzmarek et al, Nanotechnology 34 (40), 405302, 2023
[8] M.Amjadipour, et al., Batteries & Supercaps 3 (10), 587-595, 2020
[9] P.Rufangura et al, Nanomaterials 11 (9), 2339, 2021
[10] S.Faisal et al, J. Neural Eng. 18 (6), 066035, 2021
[11] S.Faisal et al, ACS Appl. Nano Mater. 6 (7), 5440-5447, 2023.