Fast growth of wafer-scale graphene on sapphire

Efficient growth of graphene over wafer-scale insulators is essential for fab-integration. Here we show that modulations of step architectures and atomic surfaces of c-plane sapphire allow fast graphene growth on 6” wafers (complete coverage in 10 mins), thus enabling batch synthesis to reduce production costs. We identify carbon capture at Al-rich surfaces and unidirectional flake emergence guided by step edges as the key elements leading to uniform graphene films. The growth quality of single-layer graphene is demonstrated by testing over 3300 top-gated device arrays on a 4” graphene/sapphire wafer, reaching mobility > 3000 cm ² V ^− 1 s ^− 1 . We use this to make white light-emitting diodes (LED) in an industrial production line, attaining ~ 25% reduction in thermal resistance and ~ 90% decrease in attenuation of light output power with respect to counterparts fabricated without graphene, during an accelerated aging test of 168 h at 85 ^o C, equivalent to 1.8 years in normal room-temperature conditions. Our findings pave the way to transfer-free batch synthesis of high-quality graphene wafers.