Suppressing flicker noise in graphene boron nitride heterostructure field-effect transistors

The low-frequency 1/f noise (sometimes called pink noise or flicker noise), which is usually found at frequencies below 100 kHz, is a ubiquitous phenomenon found in many physical, biological and even economic systems – fluctuations of the sea level; intensity in a music recording; human heart rates; or electrical currents in semiconductor devices.

This flicker noise is a crucial performance metric in many devices because it limits the sensitivity and selectivity of all the sensors that rely on an electrical response. This also includes future electronic applications of graphene that do not seriously suffer from the absence of an energy band gap but rely on graphene’s high electron mobility, thermal conductivity, saturation velocity, and a possibility of tuning the charge carrier concentration. These applications include analog electronics, high-frequency communications, THz plasmonic devices and sensor. For all these applications, the low-frequency electronic 1/f noise is a critical performance metric.

"The low-frequency noise is responsible for the dominant contribution to the phase noise of the communication systems even when they operate at much higher carrier frequency," Alexander A. Balandin, professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Riverside (UCR), explains to Nanowerk. "It also limits sensitivity and selectivity of chemical and biological sensors."