Contact and injection engineering for low SS reconfigurable FETs and high gain complementary inverters

Abstract

The newly emerged two-dimensional (2D) semiconducting materials, owning to the atomic thick nature and excellent optical and electrical properties, are considered as potential candidates to solve the bottlenecks of traditional semiconductors. However, the realization of high performance 2D semiconductor-based field-effect transistors (FETs) has been a longstanding challenge in 2D electronics, which is mainly ascribing to the presence of significant Schottky barrier (SB) at metal-semiconductor interfaces. Here, an additional contact gate is induced in 2D ambipolar FET to realize near ideal reconfigurable FET (RFET) devices without restrictions of SB. Benefitting from the consistently high doping of contact region, the effective SB height can be maintained at ultra-small value during all operation conditions, resulting in the near ideal subthreshold swing (SS) values (132 mV/decade for MoTe₂ RFET and 67 mV/decade for WSe₂ RFET) and the relatively high mobility (28.6 cm²/(V s) for MoTe₂ RFET and 89.8 cm²/(V s) for WSe₂ RFET). Moreover, the flexible control on the doping polarity of contact region enables the remodeling and switching of the achieved unipolar FETs between p-type mode and n-type mode. Based on such reconfigurable behaviors, high gain complementary MoTe₂ inverters are further realized. The findings in this work push forward the development of high-performance 2D semiconductor integrated devices and circuits.

Keywords: Complementary inverter; Reconfigurable field-effect transistor (FET); Schottky barrier; Subthreshold swing.