Iñigo Martín

When in 2005 Iñigo completed his Engineering degree, he became attracted to carbon nanomaterials because of their novelty and their potential to reshape our society. Since then, he has devoted his research career to their synthesis and properties, towards their integration into planar systems, and towards exploring applications where they will demonstrate unique benefits.

Iñigo obtained his PhD in Electronics Engineering from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) after studying carbon nanotubes (CNTs) at the Institute of Microelectronics of Barcelona (IMB-CNM, CSIC). His achievements included the growth of dense arrays of CNTs from platinum films, the fabrication of more than 10,000 working transistors on a wafer, and the upgrade of the technologies for biosensing applications.

He then completed 2 Postdoctoral stays in top and pioneering institutions in his field. At Berkeley Lab he was introduced to graphene and demonstrated an unprecedented approach for the direct growth of graphene nanoribbons by chemical vapour deposition (CVD). At the National University of Singapore (NUS) they explored alternatives to the most extended growth and processing methodologies on graphene for applications with unique benefits and towards their industrialization. Both Postdoctoral stays provided him with state-of-the-art multidisciplinary and multicultural training, they had him outside his comfort zone, and they opened and unboxed his mind.

Iñigo's merits and insights were recognized with a Marie Curie COFUND (P-Sphere) Fellowship. He joined IMB-CNM in January 2017. His work now focuses on unlocking different disruptive graphene based technologies and applications and on consolidating a Graphene Pilot Line. Iñigo is involved in the Biomedical Technologies Work Package of the Graphene Flagship and in other graphene related initiatives that also run within the Institute.

In the future, he means to solve more of these scientific and technological challenges and to translate all these advances into higher readiness levels of the related technologies and, also, to use his knowhow and insights in other related research fields and applications such as other 2D materials and ubiquitous electronics.

Iñigo's research project is entitled “Unlocking Graphene Applications”. It aims at evaluating new insights and approaches towards unraveling the technological challenges that the community still faces when meaning to shift from a single device in a laboratory environment to batch fabrication. His vision is that the current methods will not succeed because they have been designed to minimize defects rather than to take advantage of the specificity of the material (graphene is a one atom thick material that lies on a surface without bonding). Innovative approaches are still required. In parallel, Iñigo is consolidating basic building blocks processes for the fabrication and evaluation of graphene. All these processes together will be the basis to establish different technologies for simple sensors and towards graphene based electronic components.

In this frame, he became the responsible of the CVD system to grow the graphene and of the processes for the wafer scale production. Now, he can provide 4 inch wafer graphene samples. Iñigo engineers the copper foil substrates for a (111) orientation and to form abnormal grains that minimise the grain boundaries between graphene domains, then for the graphene to show improved structural and electrical characteristics. Graphene transfer wise, he has implemented a semidry transfer in the in the cleanroom. His goal, though, is to apply his insights to develop a dry transfer methodology to apply graphene on a substrate free of chemical contamination and mechanical defects, and to build the dedicated prototype tool. Device fabrication wise, Iñigo has developed a wafer based test platform that hosts tens of chips with hundreds of tests structures in each of them. These wafers are serving for the optimization of the graphene related processes.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
 

• Direct dry transfer of chemical vapor deposition graphene to polymeric substrates, G.J.M. Fechine, I. Martin Fernandez, G. Yiapanis, R. Bentini, E.S. Kulkarni, R.V. Bof de Oliveira, X. Hu, I. Yarovsky, A.H. de Castro Neto, B. Özyilmaz, Carbon 83 (2015), 224–231.

• ‘Bubble‐Free’Electrochemical Delamination of CVD Graphene Films, C.T. Cherian, F. Giustiniano, I. Martin Fernandez, H. Andersen, J. Balakrishnan, B. Ozyilmaz, Small 11 (2015), 189–194.

• Exploiting the IR Transparency of Graphene for Fast Pyroelectric Infrared Detection , E.S. Kulkarni, S. P. Heussler, A.V Stier, I. Martin Fernandez, H. Andersen, C.T. Toh, B. Ozyilmaz, Advanced Optical Materials 3 (2015), 34-38.

• Direct growth of graphene nanoribbons for large-scale device fabrication, I. Martin-Fernandez, D Wang, Y Zhang, Nano letters 12 (2012), 6175-6179.

• Real time protein recognition in a liquid-gated carbon nanotube field-effect transistor modified with aptamers, M. Palacios, I. Martin Fernandez, X. Borrisé, M. del Valle, Jordi Bartolí, E. Lora Tamayo, P. Godignon, F. Pérez Murano, M.J. Esplandium Nanoscale 4 (2012), 5917-5923.

For more information see his ResearcherID

• Integration of CVD graphene for wafer scale fabrication of devices, I. Martín Fernández, X. Illa, E. Masvidal Codina, E. Prats Alfonso, A. Guimerà Brunet, R. Villa, P. Godignon. Oral contribution to Graphene Week 2018, Donostia-San Sebastian (Spain), September 2018.

• Graphene transistors for ultra-slow frequency (< 0.1Hz) in vivo neural recordings, E. Masvidal Codina, X. Illa, M. Dasilva, A. Bonaccini Calia, E. Prats Alfonso, J. Martinez Aguilar, C. Hébert, E. Del Corro García, I. Martín Fernández, J. Bousquet, R. Villa, M.V. Sanchez Vives, J.A. Garrido, A. Guimerà Brunet. Oral contribution to Graphene2018, Dresden (Germany), June 2018.