Germany - AIXTRON (www.aixtron.com) announced that its BM 300 system has been successfully started up at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan. The system was installed in 2011 in AIST’s super cleanroom facility in Tsukuba and was commissioned by the local AIXTRON support team.

Dr. Shintaro Sato, group leader at AIST, presented the growth results on April 10 at the 2012 MRS Spring Meeting.
“With the demonstration of monolayer graphene growth on 300mm wafers at AIST, we have achieved a significant milestone,” comments Dr. Ken Teo, Director of Nanoinstruments at AIXTRON.

“The BM 300 is the most technologically advanced platform for graphene production available, incorporating a sophisticated gas delivery system for precise precursor delivery, ARGUS in-situ wafer thermal mapping, a high uniformity wafer heater and an automated handling system. The ability to deposit graphene with a high degree of controllability and repeatability onto 300mm wafers is an essential step in enabling large wafer-scale integration of graphene, and paves the way for exploiting the unique properties of graphene in next generation semiconductor devices.”

Dr. Sato’s team at AIST will use the system to deposit high-quality graphene with a controlled number of layers. This will be a key part of a process technology used for creating low-voltage operation CMOS FETs, in which the power supply voltage will be less than 0.3V.