Black Semiconductor and the GEphen project
At Black Semiconductor, our work on graphene starts at the material level. This is where incredible engineering lifts off. It is why we participate in externally funded research programs that push the boundaries of what graphene can do, and where it can go.
One of those programs is GEphen—short for Graphen auf Germanium: Anlagentechnikund Prozessintegration für Anwendungen in der Informationstechnik (Graphene on Germanium: Equipment Technology and Process Integration for Applications in Information Technology). Coordinated by AMO GmbH in Aachen.
What GEphen is about
Graphene grown on germanium (Ge) substrates offers a different material pathway for photonic device integration than the approaches most commonly used today. GEphen evaluates whether Ge-grown graphene—and the process techniques needed to work with it—can be made compatible with scalable silicon photonics platforms.
The core technical challenge is transfer: graphene grown on germanium has to be mechanically separated from that growth substrate and moved onto a photonic device wafer without degrading the material properties that make graphene useful in the first place. This is a process problem as much as a materials one.
The role of Black Semiconductor in the project
Within GEphen, Black Semiconductor is responsible for developing and optimising a peel-off transfer process that enables the mechanical separation of the graphene layer from the Ge growth substrate and its subsequent placement onto photonic device wafers.
Once transferred, the graphene is characterized and used to fabricate representativephotonic components—with photodetectors as the primary benchmark device. The performance metrics we are evaluating include bandwidth, responsivity, and darkcurrent: the numbers that tell you whether a photonic device is usable in a real chip integration context.
The objective is to assess whether Ge-grown graphene and peel-off transfer techniques are a viable route to scalable integration with silicon photonics platforms—and to generate the data needed to answer that question rigorously.
Why this matters for our platform
Black Semiconductor IGPTM technology is built around graphene's ability to convert light across any wave length—a property that makes it uniquely suited to optical communication between chips. The technology integrates graphene-based components such as modulators and photodetectors directly onto CMOS wafers within the back-end-of-line (BEOL) process flow.
Research like GEphen contributes to that work by expanding our understanding of how graphene behaves across different growth substrate and transfer conditions. The question of how graphene is grown, and how it is transferred onto a device, is central to whether the technology scales.
FabONE, our 300mm pilot manufacturing facility, is where that scaling work happens. The insights from programs like GEphen feed directly into how we think about process architecture at production level.
The GEphen project funding
The GEphen project is co-funded by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF/EFRE) under the operational program for North Rhine-Westphalia, with additional support from the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen).
The project runs from 15 July 2025 to 14 July 2028.
