Issues with the electrical characterization of graphene devices

Graphene is an attractive material for device applications, but device characteristics are very unstable because the graphene is very sensitive to environmental factors such as charges nearby the graphene, metal contacts, defects, contaminants and other adsorbates. Since the interactions between graphene and environmental factors affect the electrical characteristics of graphene devices, the interpretation of electrical characteristics as simple as current-voltage curves is non-trivial, despite the common practice of using well known electrical characterization methods that have been used in silicon MOSFET. This paper addresses major obstacles in the electrical characterization of graphene devices and offers countermeasures to improve the accuracy of electrical characterization methods.