Grolltex grows, transfers and packages CVD monolayer graphene and hexagonal boron nitride in San Diego, California — not resold from an overseas supplier.
Where the company came from
Grolltex is short for graphene rolling technologies. The company was founded on work done in the Nano Engineering department at UC San Diego, around a specific conviction: graphene would stay a laboratory curiosity until someone made it cheaply, repeatably and at a size device makers could actually use. Everything since has been aimed at that.
The process, and why it matters
Conventional CVD graphene is lifted off its growth substrate by dissolving the copper underneath it. The copper is consumed — roughly 300 kilograms of it for a single gram of graphene. That arithmetic is the reason so much graphene is priced for research budgets rather than production ones.
Grolltex uses a patented metal-assisted exfoliation process instead. The graphene is coated with a thin metal layer and thermal release tape, then lifted mechanically from the copper rather than etched off it. The graphene arrives on your substrate without ever meeting an acid bath, and the copper survives to grow the next sheet. Less damage to the film, and a cost structure that does not scale with destroyed metal.
Where this is going
Selling monolayers is the near-term business. It is not the point.
Electronics needs three classes of material: conductors, insulators and semiconductors. Two-dimensional materials offer all three — graphene as the conductor, hexagonal boron nitride as the insulator, and transition-metal dichalcogenides such as MoS₂ as the semiconductor. In principle an entire device can be built from layers one atom thick.
Today those layers are synthesised separately and stacked afterwards. Done badly, that is where 2D devices go wrong: trapped contamination, wrinkles, tears, and an interface that is an artefact of the handling rather than of the material. Grolltex holds patented transfer methods that stack 2D materials cleanly and efficiently.
The ultimate goal is epitaxy: growing the critical 2D architectures directly, in sequence, wherever it is allowable. Not every combination can be grown that way, and transfer will carry the ones that cannot. But where epitaxy is possible it is strictly better — no handling step in which to introduce a defect, an interface defined by the crystal rather than by a process, and a route to real scale, automation and performance on equipment compatible with existing semiconductor manufacturing.
That is the work. The material sold here is the ground it stands on.
Rebuilt in 2026, end to end
A new San Diego facility built around the growth and transfer line rather than inherited from it. Class 100 cleanroom, laid out so material never leaves controlled air between growth and pack-out. Production equipment updated and requalified end to end, with new QC protocols applied to every batch.
What you get, and how it is checked
Every batch is measured optically, electrically and by Raman spectroscopy before it ships. Coverage is specified at a 95% minimum, and the figure printed on your Certificate of Analysis is the one measured on your material — not a representative lot, not a datasheet typical.
Monolayer graphene and monolayer hBN are grown on 25-micron copper foil in sizes up to 8 inches, supplied as-grown or transferred to a substrate you provide. The two can be stacked as graphene-on-hBN heterostructures for work that needs the mobility.
Specifications and reference data are on the Resources page.
Who buys it
Research groups at MIT, Stanford and Columbia, alongside national laboratories, corporate R&D teams, university cleanrooms and biotech and sensor developers in 28 countries. The common thread is not sector but tolerance: these are people for whom a bad monolayer costs a month.
Standards
Graphene has a definitions problem — material sold under the same word can differ by orders of magnitude in quality, which slows commercial adoption for everyone. Grolltex has taken part in the US standards effort since 2018, when the first ISO graphene standard was published, and follows the nanotechnology standards work carried out under ANSI and ISO/TC 229.
Talk to us
Grolltex, Inc. — 7939 Silverton Ave, Suite 805, San Diego, CA 92126. Technical and ordering questions go to support@grolltex.com or (858) 727-5579. For custom sizes, substrates or volumes, send a quote request.