Skip to main content

Ultra-clean fabrication platform produces nearly ideal 2D transistors !!

Semiconductors, which are the basic building blocks of transistors, microprocessors, lasers, and LEDs, have driven advances in computing, memory, communications, and lighting technologies since the mid-20th century. Recently discovered two-dimensional materials, which feature many superlative properties, have the potential to advance these technologies, but creating 2D devices with both good electrical contacts and stable performance has proved challenging.

Researchers at Columbia Engineering report that they have demonstrated a nearly ideal transistor made from a two-dimensional (2D) material stack -- with only a two-atom-thick semiconducting layer -- by developing a completely clean and damage-free fabrication process. Their method shows vastly improved performance compared to 2D semiconductors fabricated with a conventional process, and could provide a scalable platform for creating ultra-clean devices in the future. The study was published today in Nature Electronics.
"Making devices out of 2D materials is a messy business," says James Teherani, assistant professor of electrical engineering. "Devices vary wildly from run to run and often degrade so fast that you see performance diminish while you're still measuring them."
Having grown tired of the inconsistent results, Teherani's team set out to develop a better way to make stable devices. "So," he explains, "we decided to separate the pristine device from the dirty fabrication processes that lead to variability."
As shown in this new study, Teherani and his colleagues developed a two-step, ultra-clean nanofabrication process that separates the "messy" steps of fabrication -- those that involve "dirty" metallization, chemicals, and polymers used to form electrical connections to the device -- from the active semiconductor layer. Once they complete the messy fabrication, they could pick up the contacts and transfer them onto the clean active device layer, preserving the integrity of both layers.
"The thinness of these semiconductors is a blessing and a curse," says Teherani. "While the thinness allows them to be transparent and to be picked up and placed wherever you want them, the thinness also means there's nearly zero volume -- the device is almost entirely surface. Because of this, any surface dirt or contamination will really degrade a device."
Currently, most devices are not encapsulated with a layer that protects the surface and contacts from contamination during fabrication. Teherani's team showed that their method can now not only protect the semiconductor layer so that they don't see performance degradation over time, but it can also yield high performance devices.
Teherani collaborated with Jim Hone, Wang Fong-Jen Professor of Mechanical Engineering, making use of the fabrication and analysis facilities of the Columbia Nano Initiative and the National Science Foundation-funded Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at Columbia. The team made the transferred contacts from metal embedded in insulating hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) outside a glovebox and then dry-transferred the contact layer onto the 2D semiconductor, which was kept pristine inside a nitrogen glovebox. This process prevents direct-metallization-induced damage while simultaneously providing encapsulation to protect the device.
Now that the researchers have developed a stable, repeatable process, they are using the platform to make devices that can move out of the lab into real-world engineering problems.
"The development of high performance 2D devices requires advances in the semiconductor materials from which they are made," Teherani adds. "More precise tools like ours will enable us to build more complex structures with potentially greater functionality and better performance."
The study was supported by the National Science Foundation through CAREER Award (ECCS-1752401) and the Center for Precision Assembly of Superstratic and Superatomic Solids (DMR-1420634). This work is also supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea through the Global Research Laboratory (GRL) program (2016K1A1A2912707) and Research Fellow program (2018R1A6A3A11045864).
Article Source:
Materials provided by Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science. Original written by Holly Evarts.
 Note: Content may be edited.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dark matter may be older than the Big Bang

Dark matter, which researchers believe make up about 80% of the universe's mass, is one of the most elusive mysteries in modern physics. What exactly it is and how it came to be is a mystery, but a new Johns Hopkins University study now suggests that dark matter may have existed before the Big Bang. The study, published August 7 in  Physical Review Letters , presents a new idea of how dark matter was born and how to identify it with astronomical observations. "The study revealed a new connection between particle physics and astronomy. If dark matter consists of new particles that were born before the Big Bang, they affect the way galaxies are distributed in the sky in a unique way. This connection may be used to reveal their identity and make conclusions about the times before the Big Bang too," says Tommi Tenkanen, a postdoctoral fellow in Physics and Astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University and the study's author. While not much is known about its origins,...
Post a Comment
Read more

Home births as safe as hospital births: International study suggests

A large international study led by McMaster University shows that low risk pregnant women who intend to give birth at home have no increased chance of the baby's perinatal or neonatal death compared to other low risk women who intend to give birth in a hospital. The results have been published by  The Lancet 's  EClinicalMedicine  journal. "More women in well-resourced countries are choosing birth at home, but concerns have persisted about their safety," said Eileen Hutton, professor emeritus of obstetrics and gynecology at McMaster, founding director of the McMaster Midwifery Research Centre and first author of the paper. "This research clearly demonstrates the risk is no different when the birth is intended to be at home or in hospital." The study examined the safety of place of birth by reporting on the risk of death at the time of birth or within the first four weeks, and found no clinically important or statistically different risk between home...
Post a Comment
Read more

GSAT-11 satellite to be launched from French Guiana on Dec 5th

GSAT-11 satellite to be launched from French Guiana on Dec 5th GSAT-11 would be located at 74 East and is the fore-runner in a series of advanced communications satellite with multi-spot beam antenna coverage over Indian mainland and Islands, ISRO said. GSAT-11 is the next generation “high throughput” communication satellite configured around ISRO’s I-6K Bus. (PTI/Representational). Indian space agency ISRO is scheduled to launch GSAT-11, the “heaviest” satellite built by it, on-board Ariane-5 rocket of Arianespace from French Guiana on December 5. Weighing about 5,854 kg, GSAT-11 would play a vital role in providing broadband services across the country, and also provide a platform to demonstrate new generation applications, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said. It is the “heaviest” satellite built by ISRO, the space agency said. GSAT-11 is the next generation “high throughput” communication satellite configured around ISRO’s  I-6K Bus, and it...
Post a Comment
Read more