The fusion of graphene with silicon may provide an effective solution to the problem of scale in electronic devices. This approach will allow the excellent electronic properties of graphene to be combined with known Si device technologies. We review the epitaxial growth of graphene on Si substrates (GOS) for fabricating transistors. GOS has been multifunctionalized by controlling the orientation of the Si substrate. The site-selective epitaxy of GOS has also been developed by controlling the base SiC thin films. These results demonstrate that GOS is suitable for integrated devices.

Self-aligned source/drain (S/D) graphene field-effect transistors (GFETs) with extremely small access lengths were successfully fabricated using a simple device fabrication process without sidewall spacer formation. The self-aligned S/D GFET exhibits superior electrical characteristics, such as the intrinsic carrier mobility of 6100 cm2/Vs, the gate leakage current of 10-10-10-9A and the contact resistance of 412 Ωμm. In particular, a cutoff frequency of 13 GHz was achieved with a rather large gate length (LG= 3 μm), which demonstrates the promising future of this self-aligned GFET.

This special issue aims to highlight some of the different devices and applications currently being pursued. This volume of the Special Issue has 19 papers that roughly cover five subareas that are important for future applications of graphene in electronic and photonic devices, circuits, and systems. The subareas are: 1) epitaxial growth of graphene; 2) single field-effect transistors (FETs), high-frequency RF mixer circuits, frequency multipliers, and oscillators; 3) multiscale modeling of graphene-based transistors; 4) graphene photonics, including plasmonic applications, graphene-based teraHertz devices, and graphene-based photodetectors; and 5) other graphene-based devices and applications such as resistive memory, on-chip interconnects, microelectromechanical systems, and graphene bioelectronics. The papers are briefly summarized here.