Graphene nano platelets tuneable conducting properties for innovative microwave components

It was with the innovative technique of deploying the use of few layer graphene (FLG) flakes that the bottleneck in the design of microwave passive components with graphene, owing to the large dimensions of components at microwave frequencies, was overcome. With the increase in the number of graphene layers and their dimensions, the higher carrier mobility is lost, since a regime beyond ballistic comes into play. The interesting property of tuneability, however remains intact. An added benefit of FLG is that they are easily produced and do not require any sophisticated and expensive equipment. In this brief review, we recap a few recently proposed devices and prototypes, exploiting the electrostatically tuneable conductivity of FLG thin films in the microwave frequency range, i.e. broadband graphene attenuators, patch antennas and phase shifters.