After decades of relentless progress, the evolutionary path of the silicon CMOS industry is finally approaching an end. Fundamental physical limitations do not enable silicon to scale beyond the 10-nm technology node without severely compromising a device’s performance. To reinforce the accelerating pace, there is an urgent and immediate need for alternative materials. Low-dimensional materials in general, and 2-D layered material in particular, are extremely interesting in this context. They offer unique electrical, optical, mechanical, and chemical properties. In addition, they feature excellent electrostatic integrity and inherent scalability, which makes them attractive from a technological standpoint. Graphene, hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN), and more recently the rich family of transition metal dichalcogenides—comprising Molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), WS2, WSe2, and many more—have received a lot of scientific attention as the future of nanoelectronics. The most widely studied material, grapheme, had reported intrinsic field effect mobility value as high as 10,000 cm2/Vs. However, the absence of an energy gap in the electronic band structure of grapheme, along with the challenges associated with making a stable interface with the gate dielectric, raises a lot of concern for grapheme-based nanoelectronics for logic applications. Hence, it paves the way for semiconducting 2-D materials such as MoS2 and others.

MoS2 is a stack of single layers held together by weak van der Waals interlayer interaction, and, therefore, enables micromechanical exfoliation of one or a few layers—similar to the fabrication of graphene from graphite. It is a semiconductor with an indirect bandgap of 1.2 eV. Single- and multilayer MoS2 field-effect transistors (FETs) with high on/off-current ratios (108) and excellent subthreshold swing (74 mV/decade) close to the ideal limit have been demonstrated. Basic integrated circuits (e.g., inverters and ring oscillators) have been reported. And initial studies also indicate that MoS2 has great potential in future nanoelectronics, sensing, and energy harvesting.

While there is a growing interest in MoS2-based nanoelectronics devices, the practice of evaluating their potential usefulness for electronic applications is still in its infancy since we don’t have a complete picture of their performance potential and scaling limits. My research addresses the major issues about the realization of high-performance logic devices based on ultra-thin MoS2 flakes. One of the major challenges in the realization of high-performance nano devices arises from the fact that these nanostructures need to be connected to the “outside” world to capitalize on their ultimate potential. Any interface between a low-dimensional nanostructure and a 3-D metal contact will inevitably affect the total system’s performance, which will strongly depend on the said contact’s quality. We have demonstrated that through a proper understanding and design of source/drain contacts and the right choice of the number of MoS2 layers to use, the excellent intrinsic properties of this 2-D material can be realized. Using scandium contacts on 10-nm-thick exfoliated MoS2 flakes that are covered by a 15-nm Al2O3 film, record high mobilities of 700 cm2/Vs are achieved at room temperature. This breakthrough is largely attributed to the fact that we succeeded in eliminating contact resistance effects that limited the device performance in the past unrecognized. We have also investigated the ultimate scaling potential of multilayer MoS2 field effect transistors (FETs) with channel lengths ranging from 1 µm down to 50 nm. Our results indicate that the multilayer MoS2 FETs are extremely resilient to short channel effects. We have demonstrated record high drive current density of 2.5 mA/µm and record high transconductance of 500 µs/µm for a 50-nm-long MoS2 transistor, which are comparable to state-of-the-art silicon technology.

In short, MoS2 preserves all the important properties of silicon with the added advantage of an ultra-thin layer structure, which allows for aggressive channel length scaling down to 2 nm and, therefore, has the potential to outperform silicon beyond the 10-nm technology node. Properly nourishing the development of MoS2 can be a real game changer for the future of the micro- and nanoelectronics industry.—by Saptarshi Das, Circuit Cellar 270, January 2012