Properties of Commercially Available Hexagonal Boron Nitride Grown By The CVD Method

A new technical paper titled “On the quality of commercial chemical vapour deposited hexagonal boron nitride” was published by researchers at KAUST and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan.

Abstract
“The semiconductors industry has put its eyes on two-dimensional (2D) materials produced by chemical vapour deposition (CVD) because they can be grown at the wafer level with small thickness fluctuations, which is necessary to build electronic devices and circuits. However, CVD-grown 2D materials can contain significant amounts of lattice distortions, which degrades the performance at the device level and increases device-to-device variability. Here we statistically analyse the quality of commercially available CVD-grown hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) from the most popular suppliers. h-BN is of strategic importance because it is one of the few insulating 2D materials, and can be used as anti-scattering substrate and gate dielectric. We find that the leakage current and electrical homogeneity of all commercially available CVD h-BN samples are significantly worse than those of mechanically exfoliated h-BN of similar thickness. Moreover, in most cases the properties of the CVD h-BN samples analysed don’t match the technical specifications given by the suppliers, and the sample-to-sample variability is unsuitable for the reproducible fabrication of capacitors, transistors or memristors in different batches. In the short term, suppliers should try to provide accurate sample specifications matching the properties of the commercialized materials, and researchers should keep such inaccuracies in mind; and in the middle term suppliers should try to reduce the density of defects to enable the fabrication of high-performance devices with high reliability and reproducibility.”

Find the technical paper here. Published May 2024.

Yuan, Y., Weber, J., Li, J. et al. On the quality of commercial chemical vapour deposited hexagonal boron nitride. Nat Commun 15, 4518 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-48485-w.