Graphenea - Page 3

Graphenea recently announced that its graphene foundry service (GFAB), launched in 2019, will be getting an upgrade. Graphenea Foundry said that it will start a Multi-Project Wafer run service from January 2021, and it is currently speaking with customers interested in this first run.

Graphenea Foundry follows a pure-play foundry model, in which it manufactures graphene-based devices for its customers and third parties under request. Nevertheless, the factory also makes usable plug&play graphene devices from scratch, thus covering all aspects of device manufacturing. The staple product and the starting point for satisfying most customer needs is the GFET, the graphene field effect transistor. These readily-available devices are said to be ideal for early experiments and proof-of-concept measurements.

Graphenea has announced the successful completion of project G4SEMI, funded by the European Commission SME Instrument.

The project, which lasted two years, aimed at integrating graphene into CMOS semiconductor workflows. The business goal was to create added value through fast-tracking market acceptance of graphene-on-wafer by lowering the technological barriers to adoption of graphene by the €545 billion semiconductor devices industry.

As researchers and companies all over the world set out to battle the Coronavirus pandemic, many are revisiting graphene as a material with potential for helping to win this fight. The reasons for such potential could be found in graphene's known antibacterial/antiviral properties, its beneficial traits for medical sensors and devices and more.

Graphene has been shown in the past as extremely useful for creating various sensors. Earlier this month, a team led by Boston College researchers used a sheet of graphene to track the electronic signals inherent in biological structures, in order to develop a platform to selectively identify deadly strains of bacteria. In October 2019, Rice University team under chemist James Tour transformed their laser-induced graphene (LIG) into self-sterilizing filters that grab pathogens out of the air and kill them with small pulses of electricity. Commercially sold graphene-based sensors exist, like the graphene oxide (GO) sensor developed by the ICN2 Nanobioelectronics and Biosensors group that was added in 2016 to the list products offered by Biolin Scientific, a prestigious instrumentation company devoted to the production of analytical devices. The Q-Sense GO sensor enables interaction studies of GO with various analytes (measured substances) of interest and may open the door to various applications with interest for diagnostics, safety/security and environmental monitoring.

With the emergence of the Covid-19 virus and its global threat, Graphenea initiated several steps to try and help those trying to combat this crisis. On March 16^th, Graphenea approached all those performing research on treatment and diagnosis of Covid-19, to offer free graphene.

Now, Graphenea announced the production of a disinfectant alcohol-based hydrogel following World Health Organization recommendations and pharmaceutical guidelines. As part of its effort to join the battle against COVID-19, Graphenea will donate the hand sanitizer to public authorities for use in hospitals, by seniors, police and/or military personnel. The aim is to protect medical personnel, high risk groups, and law enforcement agents against the virus.

Graphenea has announced the launch of a new product highly flat monolayer graphene. The graphene is grown by CVD on copper thin film on a 2 sapphire substrate. With extremely low roughness that is less than 4 nm, this new product is targeted at applications in photonics, high-performance electronics, magnetic memory, and freestanding membranes.

The product aims to meet wafer-scale integration requirements to build uniform graphene devices in a fashion compatible with current industrial fabrication methods. The flat graphene product is ready to be transferred by electrochemical delamination or dry methods since the sapphire substrate is robust enough to withstand mechanical damage, preventing tearing and wrinkling of the thin Cu sheet. The total wafer thickness is 430 micrometers. Full product information can be found in Graphenea's online store.

Due to graphene's 2D geometry, most of the device applications require graphene to be partially or fully supported by a substrate, which is typically silicon dioxide (SiO₂). An important example of a typical graphene structure on SiO₂ is the graphene field effect transistor GFET, a sheet of graphene connected to metal terminals on the planar substrate. The current common understanding is that graphene interacts with SiO₂ through weak, long-range van der Waals forces, even though experimental evidence suggests a surprisingly strong interaction between graphene and SiO2 that affects all properties of the device.

Now, a multinational research team from the University of Trento, Italian Space Agency and Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Italy, Graphenea in Spain, Institute of Chemical Engineering Sciences and University of Patras in Greece, and Queen Mary University of London in the UK has shown that surface charges on the oxide are a main factor of strong interaction between graphene and SiO₂, paving the way for designing 2D material interaction with a substrate through manipulation of surface charges. Such control of graphene-substrate interactions would facilitate the development of new graphene-based microelectronic devices.

This is a sponsored post by Graphenea

Graphenea recently launched a graphene foundry service GFAB. The company will manufacture custom circuit designs on graphene wafers up to 6. The service is aimed at enabling fast device prototyping and accelerating development of new applications, lowering entry barriers to graphene-based solutions.

Graphenea states that in view of the market demands, the offer now includes small batch sizes (1-3 wafers). Lithography masks can be manufactured by Graphenea or provided by the customer. GFAB includes graphene growth, transfer on 4 and 6 wafers, metal contact deposition and lift-off, and graphene lithography with etching.

Graphenea, AMO and Emberion have been approved a European Innovation Council Fast Track to Innovation (FTI) project to help bring to market the G-IMAGER, a graphene imager based on graphene-on-wafer technology. The G-Imager is a short-wave infrared (SWIR) detector for applications in semiconductor inspection, sorting systems, spectroscopy hyperspectral imaging and surveillance.

A major obstacle for wider use of SWIR imaging products is the high cost of SWIR detectors, which are currently primarily manufactured with InGaAs technology. The high price is related to the complex manufacturing of InGaAs that also prevents increase of the detector production volumes. Now Graphenea Semiconductor SL, Emberion Oy, and AMO GmbH are tasked with constructing and marketing the G-Imager which will bring the core price down significantly, allowing market volumes to grow substantially.

2018 was a busy year for the graphene industry, and here are our top companies for 2018 - ranked by the number of posts written about them on graphene-info.

1. Versarien
2. Haydale
3. First Graphene
4. Directa Plus
5. Talga
6. AGM
7. Zenyatta
8. Graphenea
9. NanoXplore
10. XG Sciences

While these figures are not of any official status, they do go a certain distance in assessing the market and its major players in 2018.

A joint collaboration of researchers from SCALE Nanotech, Graphenea and TU Delft have used graphene to make reflective-type displays that operate faster and at much higher resolution than existing technologies.

2500ppi GIMOD prototype showcased at the Mobile World Congress. Credit: Graphene Flagship

Displays consume the most power in electronic gadgets. Portable devices like smartphones and VR visors therefore require most of the energy from batteries. As an alternative solution, reflective-type displays (like those in e-book readers) consume much less power, though they cannot deliver video. Reflective displays that offer the specifications of standard technologies (OLED, LCD) do not exist yet, but graphene may open the door to such possibilities.