Thickness-Controlled Black Phosphorus Tunnel Field-Effect Transistor for Low Power Switches

Abstract

The continuous down-scaling of transistors has been the key to the successful development of current information technology. However, with Moore's law reaching its limits, the development of alternative transistor architectures is urgently needed. Transistors require a switching voltage of at least 60 mV for each tenfold increase in current, that is, a subthreshold swing (SS) of 60 mV per decade (dec). Alternative tunnel field-effect transistors (TFETs) are widely studied to achieve a sub-thermionic SS and high I60 (the current where SS becomes 60 mV/dec). Heterojunction (HJ) TFETs show promise for delivering a high I60, but experimental results do not meet theoretical expectations due to interface problems in the HJs constructed from different materials. Here, we report a natural HJ-TFET with spatially varying layer thickness in black phosphorus without interface problems. We achieved record-low average SS values over 4-5 dec of current (SSave_4dec = ~22.9 mV/dec and SSave_5dec = ~26.0 mV/dec) with record-high I60 (I60 = 0.65-1 uA/um), paving the way for application in low-power switches.

18 pages, 3 figures, accepted by Nature Nanotechnology

References in corpus (4)

• Computational 2D Materials Database: Electronic Structure of Transition-Metal Dichalcogenides and Oxides
• Energy Dissipation and Transport in Nanoscale Devices
• Fast pick up technique for high quality heterostructures of bilayer graphene and hexagonal boron nitride
• Thickness Engineered Tunnel Field-Effect Transistors based on Phosphorene

Cited by in corpus (7)

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• All 2D Heterostructure Tunnel Field Effect Transistors: Impact of Band Alignment and Heterointerface Quality
• Strongly-bound excitons and trions in anisotropic 2D semiconductors
• Dirac-Source Diode with Sub-unity Ideality Factor
• Indium selenides for next-generation low-power computing devices
• Anisotropic Pseudospin Tunneling in Two-Dimensional Black Phosphorus Junctions
• Interface engineering of van der Waals heterostructures towards energy-efficient quantum devices operating at high temperatures