New 2D transistors lay foundation for faster electronics

Electronic device architectures may soon become a lot faster as researchers have now unveiled the world's first fully two-dimensional field-effect transistor (FET) that provides high electron mobility even under high voltages.

Unlike conventional FETs made from silicon, these 2D FETs suffer no performance drop-off under high voltages and provide high electron mobility, even when scaled to a monolayer in thickness.

"The results demonstrate the promise of using an all-layered material system for future electronic applications," said Ali Javey, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at University of California, Berkeley in the US.

The 2D heterostructures were fabricated from layers of a transition metal dichalcogenide, hexagonal boron nitride and graphene stacked via van der Waals interactions, or relatively weak electric forces that attract neutral molecules to one another in gases, in liquefied and solidified gases, and in almost all organic liquids and solids.

"Our work represents an important stepping stone towards the realisation of a new class of electronic devices in which interfaces based on van der Waals interactions rather than covalent bonding provide an unprecedented degree of control in material engineering and device exploration," Javey said.

The van der Waals bonding of the interfaces and the use of a multi-step transfer process present a platform for making complex devices based on crystalline layers without the constraints of lattice parameters that often limit the growth and performance of conventional heterojunction materials, he added.

The study appeared in the journal ACS Nano.