Graphene directly grown on SiO2-based insulators

Strong effort is devoted to grow graphene directly on insulators to create a technological step towards cost effective mass production of high-frequency transistors on Si. We have shown recently, that direct graphene growth can be achieved on silicate substrates by solid carbon source deposition. Here, we present a study on the growth of graphene on insulator by means of Raman and photoelectron spectroscopy, corroborated by density functional theory calculations. We address temperature dependence and the correlation between graphene quality and the number of layers. We show that this approach may open a pathway to Si-compatible graphene growth for electronic applications.